This post is epic. It is so long that you may wonder what kind of narcissist writes this much about themselves. In an effort to keep you from hating me while reading this, I have divided the post into three sections so you can take breaks: part 1) a narrative of my journey to this point, part 2) reasons why I wanted to return to China, part 3) general observations. I hope this satiates your interest in my travels.
It has been over a week since I arrived in Shanghai, and everything has gone swimmingly despite my best efforts (or lack thereof). My travels here were a model for how not to travel abroad, a true exercise in lack of preparation. I did not review any Chinese. I did not invest much time or thought into packing. I left without arranging accommodation for when I arrived. I didn’t even know my flight itinerary. Although I’d like to use the excuse of being too busy with law school excuse as a justification, I had over a week after the writing competition ended to get things together. I chose to relax and hang out with my friends instead.
This last issue proved to be pressing not long after leaving Atlanta two Sundays ago. I thought I had an eight hour layover in Chicago with my flight to Seoul leaving at 12:30 at night. As it turns out, 12:30PM is in the afternoon, so a twenty hour, overnight layover awaited me instead. I vaguely recall reading that I my layover was eight hours, and I don’t put it past computers to intentionally spite people. Even though I booked my ticket hastily, flight booking websites generally show the length of layovers and total flight time, and in spite of having much pride in being a hardy traveler, I don’t think I would subject myself to an over forty hour flight itinerary.
Unfazed, I got on the internet in the Chicago airport and looked for a couch to surf that night. (For those unfamiliar with couchsurfing, it is a website where people offer to host travelers in their homes to show local hospitality and engage in cultural exchange. Sean and I couchsurfed across Europe last summer and it was definitely the best part of our trip.) I found someone to host me, went to dinner with my host, and used the remainder of my short time in Chicago to look for another couch to surf once I got to Shanghai.
My flight to Seoul was quite nice. I flew Korea Air, so I watched Godzilla and sumo wrestling for in-flight entertainment, and geishas served as flight attendants. They gave me a pair of teal socks for walking around the plane and kept refilling my wine at meals. I have to recommend Korea Air.
After a short delay, I made my connection to Beijing. When we pulled up to the gate, Chinese health inspectors entered the plane wearing face masks. They took people’s temperature remotely by aiming some device at your forehead. They were on the lookout for swine flu and were taking no chances. People who had a fever were taken off the plane. Since getting to Shanghai, I have heard that these people who were lead off of planes have been quarantined for a week to make sure that they are not carriers of the virus. On the illustrious list of people to be quarantined is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I’m glad I connected in Korea because I’ve heard the examination was much worse coming from the US. A friend told me that they inspected his plane for two hours.
My flight from Seoul to Beijing was delayed just long enough to prevent me from taking a sleeper train immediately to Shanghai that night. The reason I flew to Beijing instead of Shanghai is because I booked my ticket before I had an internship. I knew I wanted to return to China to intern this summer, but I couldn’t find any organizations to take me on. When prices for plane tickets started rising hundreds of dollars by the day, I decided to buy a ticket, and if I couldn’t find a job in advance, I would just find one when I got on the ground. I assumed people would have to take me seriously if I showed up at their office telling them I would work for free.
I had opportunities available to me through my alumni mentor in Boston, but I thought that if I just settled for something I really didn’t want to do, I’d regret it. Luckily, I found an internship in advance. Of all the cities in China, I thought Beijing would be the best choice for the summer, but when I found work, it was in Shanghai. Rather than pay the exorbitant price of changing the ticket, I opted for the train.
I stayed the night in a hostel by the main train station and left from the south train station in the morning. I took one of the new high-speed trains. Riding in the hard seat section of that train was a stark departure from the cattle cars I had known as hard seaters. As the passenger next to me tried to strike up conversation, I began to regret not studying more Chinese in my time away from the country. But jet lag set in to cover my regret, carrying me in a coma to Shanghai.
Wednesday night, I arrived in Shanghai, about seventy hours after leaving Atlanta. I stayed with a French girl and two German guys that night. The next day, I went looking for an apartment and accepted the first one I looked at. I moved in on Friday morning.
My roommates are a British English teacher, James, his Chinese girlfriend, Amy, and a French student here for an internship, Melanie. I really like all three. James is a career English teacher, and he exhibits all the strangeness that is characteristic of a person who chooses teaching English in China as a life-long profession. However, he is one of my favorite English teachers that I have met. When I came to look at the apartment, we started chatting. He asked me if I read the Economist, and this eventually lead to a conversation about philosophy. We are a good roommate pairing. Amy is very funny and friendly; she always will take the time to give me a little Chinese lesson when I need to go do something that requires unfamiliar vocabulary. She and James interact like an old married couple. Neither of them could speak each other’s language when they met, but both have learned, with James’ Chinese being superior to Amy’s English. Melanie is very nice as well and has let me tag along with her on a couple trips out in the city. She is the socialite of the group and has thoroughly familiarized herself with Shanghai’s nightlife in her four months here.
On my first trip walking around the city, I ran into one of my law school classmates on the sidewalk. I knew he was going to be here; we had plans to meet up, but the probability of just walking into someone you know in a city of about fifteen million people is baffling.
I reported to work for the first time Friday afternoon. I am interning with China Economic Review. It is an English language business publication mainly for expat managers in Shanghai and Beijing. Quickly I realized how much I had to learn about writing in business journalism. Philosophical and legal writing is very dry; an emphasis is placed on showing steps of logical reasoning instead of being pleasant to read. Business has a lot of ridiculous jargon, for example synergize and dynamic, that don’t really mean anything, and journalism requires engaging your audience.
Overall, I’m enjoying work thus far. In editing, I’m having a tough time deciding what is substance and what is fluff, but I really like it. Editing someone else’s work implies that you know how to write better than the author in a sense, and I appreciate that flattery. I’m getting to read so many articles about China; I’m going to learn more about the country this summer than I ever thought I would. I’m looking forward to editing some legal content and getting to write some articles of my own. My work this summer should be engaging.
Seeing the production process has been very interesting as well. Its amazing to me that ten people in a corner of an office full of Chinese people sitting at desks can put together three magazines per month. C.E.R. Focus is about to go to print, so I came in on the last phase of the production cycle. I got to select photos for some of the stories, and looking at the drafts today and seeing the changes I had made get into the final copy was really rewarding. This month’s issue is about business education, and it was particularly insightful to see the sales and editorial staff go back and forth about how content should be presented about their advertisers with one side trying to please the clients and the other side trying to maintain journalistic integrity.
I got the job through a friend from UGA named Evan. He is the person who sparked my interest in China and recommended that I go to Harbin on my first trip. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study here in China last year, and he put me in contact with my current boss, Pete, also a participant of the Fulbright program. The first time we talked, Pete more or less offered me the job, and I accepted immediately. I’m editing for free, but I get paid by the word for any content I get published.
It has been about three years since I saw Evan last, but he and his girlfriend, GP, came to Shanghai last weekend. Pete, Evan, their two girlfriends, and I had dinner at Pete’s apartment Saturday night. Pete lives in a quiet alley that feels far away from the bustle of Shanghai. We dined al fresco in the alley with occasional interruptions from the neighbor with Tourette’s. Pete showed us to a martini bar that night that oozed the nostalgia of turn of the century Shanghai. We sat on crawl-legged sofas across from a bar made of old wood and mirrors. We were served by waiters in tuxedos. We drank the most expensive drinks I have ever drank.
I met Evan, GP, and one of their friends the next morning for a dim sum brunch. Evan and I talked about Atlanta, China, and a number of other topics. It was the kind of conversation that is so rewarding that it reminds you why you are friends with someone. However, the part of the conversation I want to bring up is about being civilized. There are signs in Shanghai, most notably in the subway, telling people to be civilized. It was duly noted by their friend that Chinese people wear pants, so what does it mean to be civilized? They could have chosen “courteous” or “considerate,” but the word is civilized. Is this just another bad Chinglish translation? If not, how insulting is it when you have to tell your own people that generally their behavior is fundamentally wrong?
Taking the subway to work in the morning is an experience. The subway itself is clean, modern and efficient with large, well-lit stations. I live close enough to work to walk or bike, but I’ve dismissed both options. It is too steamy to walk without being soaking wet before you get to work. I seriously considered buying a bike but decided against it because of the hassle of buying and selling it in a two month period and subjecting myself to the dangers of being a part of Chinese traffic.
On the subway, I take one stop, connect in the center of the city, People’s Square, and take one more stop to my office. During rush hour, the People’s Square stop is like a demonstration of molecular dynamics. People press together in areas of high concentration like elevators, stairs, and the doors to the trains and then disperse in the wide corridors. Old ladies and businessmen alike sprint off the trains to be first in line for the escalator. There are designated points where the doors will be when the train stops, and there are instructions on the floor to form lines on either side of the door and wait until passengers get off before trying to get on. Nonetheless, some people chose to stand in front of the doors and try to wriggle there way through the exiting mass onto the train. I’m in a great position to observe this great migration, being a head taller than the crowd. I think it would be a less interesting and more exhausting if I didn’t have access to fresh air. Also, by only having to go one stop on each leg of the trip, I can conveniently position myself by the door for these short trips.
Evan also indirectly provided me with another contact that I think will prove to be pretty important. He forwarded me an email during my job search about an opportunity to do research for a Chinese law firm in Shenzhen for the majority of the summer and Shanghai as well. Having at least the chance to get paid at China Economic Review and not wanting to be in the sweltering southern boomtown of Shenzhen, I took no action.
But once I started this job and realized it would be a tough sell to make it seem like a good legal credential, I emailed the firm to see if I could help with the project. There was an article attached to the email written by one of the founding partners of the firm, Dr. Liu Nanping, about deducing corruption in Chinese courts from the poor reasoning of judicial opinions alone. I was intrigued. The firm replied the next day. Dr. Liu was here in Shanghai, and I was invited to dinner the following day. I accepted.
I was a little nervous for the dinner meeting because I had never had any formal meetings with a Chinese person and had no knowledge of Chinese (or Western for that matter) business dining etiquette. The internet proved to be a valuable resource for learning customs, thereby easing my nerves.
Dr. Liu interviewed me in his office before diner. The interview started with an indirect request for praise. What do you know about the firm, the project, etc? He then asked a few questions about my resume and what I could do with his project. I agreed to help him with editing the English translation and to do some research in my free time. We walked around his office, and I received introductions to his staff and the porcelain pieces on his shelves. He was sure to pull out his laser pointer to direct my attention to each piece. I couldn’t contain my smile.
Dinner was more engaging. All pretenses were dropped, and Dr. Liu proved to be a very amiable and funny man. I enjoyed his staff as well. He asked me a lot about American politics and Obama, and I, in turn, asked him his views on the Chinese President, Hu Jintao. He said that he was the right person to be leading the country at this time; to which I replied, “So, you think the country is headed in the right direction?” He said no; there should at least be democracy within the Chinese Communist Party. I asked if he was a party member. He said no, his membership was terminated while he was getting an LLM at Yale. I asked why, and he said that if he told me that, I would have too good of a story for my magazine. Eventually, he agreed to tell me the story when I’m leaving. I asked if he was afraid of being blacklisted in the legal community for his articles, and he claimed that they force judges to be honest with his firm or risk ending up publicly denounced. Working with him is going to be a very good experience.
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I imagine some of you are wondering why I wanted to come back to China. Certainly, I should explain myself for being back in China after leaving prematurely on my first trip. I wanted to go back for a number of reasons. In a lot of ways, my previous experience has been romanticized in my mind. I remember sitting around big tables of food and beer with my friends. I remember remarkable things happening regularly, friends buying billboard advertisements as birthday presents, seeing a half-man sitting on the sidewalk, getting asked to model in the grocery store, buying fruit out of a truck that just came from the farm. Especially with learning Chinese, everyday is challenging and interesting.
After living in Boston for a while, I’ve realized that I really appreciate having everything available to me at little expense. Your money goes much further in a developing country. And the developing world is where all the big changes are taking place with China as the engine of those changes. It is still where everything is happening. And with the current state of the economy, China is the best chance I have to establish a career in the developing world. Getting legitimate experience in China on my resume will be extremely valuable entering the work force.
Furthermore, I think this experience is going to be very different than my last. I'm in the New York of China, not Milwaukee, and I have much more fulfilling work in terms of its demand and importance.
But probably the most important reason, a largely subconscious reason before I got here, is that coming back offers a chance of redemption on my last trip. Reading through my writings, I’m embarrassed at my loss of composure in emotionally trying situations. I let my paranoia about being taken advantage of change me into a mean and aggressive person at times, even when there was really nothing at stake other than a few dollars and my own dignity.
James was telling me the other day about how during the first six months he was here, he hated Chinese people. He couldn’t deal with bargaining, feeling ripped off, and his perception of people being rude. After that, he got over his culture shock. Then I realized that that is what I was experiencing, culture shock. I assumed that the only symptom of culture shock was homesickness, not anger. I always attributed the problems I had to China; it was inauthentic, inconvenient, cold, dirty. I ultimately concluded that what I was seeing was authentically China and that it was just undesirable. But really, the problem was in me and my inability to adapt. You can live in China easily, over a billion people do it, but it is much tougher carrying your cultural assumptions of how people should behave.
Surely there are plenty of cultural institutions in China that could be improved, and my perspective as an outsider cues me to that. But I needed to learn how accept the frustrations as the way of life here and not take it personally because it isn’t personal, and in the end, I don’t have to be here if I don’t like it. China is never inauthentic; what I’m experiencing is always China. It is always just a question of desirability.
Backpacking in Europe this past summer also put some perspective on my trip to China; I had enjoyed feeling established and connected in Madrid and Harbin and just passing through and looking wasn’t going to be satisfying. I had dismissed Harbin and its discomfort in the expectation of taking pleasure in backpacking, something I wasn’t going to find really fulfilling no matter where I did it. My expectations for traveling in China were impossible to meet.
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I was right when I thought that things would be different this time; even though I’m in the same country, the two trips have been barely comparable. I was immediately comfortable once I stepped off the plane into China. I already knew exactly how to get through customs, catch a bus to the train station, buy a ticket to Shanghai, find a hostel, and so on. I haven’t even gotten sick adjusting to China. It really hasn’t felt very foreign.
I hardly ever think about being in China unless I see a display full of large stuffed animals and Hello Kitty products in a McDonald's, a sign translated into English as "be civilized," or a commercial on the subway with pregnant women modeling maternity clothes. As I going to Dr. Liu’s office, it was rush hour and I was walking away from the subway while everyone else was walking towards the subway. Motorcycles and scooters had taken to the sidewalk and were flying by either side of me. Because I was in a hurry, I was just worried about being on time, and it took me a couple blocks to realize that I was walking head on into traffic and that this doesn’t happen everyday. But here, this is just life.
The most noticeable change in China over the past two years is the tightening up of internet restrictions. To go with many major, foreign news outlets, now I can’t access youtube, adultswim.com, hulu and any other site with videos, and these are my usual sources for TV entertainment. All of blogspot is blocked, so I had to send this to Sean to post. Maybe there are more restrictions because I moved to a bigger city with more resources, but I imagine the Great Firewall of China being a single entity. My guess is that the Chinese government wants to block access to any political material because it has become more nervous about political unrest in the financial crisis; the government itself estimates that the economy has to keep growing at around at least eight percent to keep unemployment from causing upheaval. If this is the case, then the internet has become a litmus test for the mood of the Party.
Shanghai has many idiosyncrasies to distinguish it from other Chinese cities I’ve seen. There are crossing guards at major intersections wearing hats that say “traffic assistant” and khaki instead of blue to tell them apart from the real police. They blow whistles at the ubiquitous jaywalkers. Just out side of my office, skateboarders show off in People’s Square.
The populous is pretty cosmopolitan. The people are more attractive and better dressed than elsewhere in China, and it seems like there is a substantial number of Shanghainese that have a working knowledge of English. The most striking experiences in my mind have been when I start talking to people in Chinese and get English in response. Even lowly subway attendants reply in English. In my experience, this doesn’t happen in China at large.
They don’t stare at white people either. There is no yelling “hello,” giggling with friends, or requests for autographs and pictures. They take note, probably because I’m so tall, but they glance not gawk.
Shanghai is modern everywhere. There are very few low rise buildings. But even with the skyscrapers everywhere, I don’t find the city to be very photogenic. Pollution deprives the city of what would be an impressive skyline. During the first flew days, sunlight diffused though the pollution giving the sky a yellow glow, but most of the time it is just gray. Maybe you can spot some blue looking straight up. One day, my eyes started to burn just from being outside. My lungs regularly feel like I’ve been chain smoking.
The weather is extremely humid and hot. This is compounded by mosquitoes that feast on me while I sleep. I’ve solved these two problems by not walking anywhere during the day, turning on the air conditioner in my room, and buying an electric mosquito repelling machine. My room is now a palace of comfort.
Undermining one of the reasons for coming to China is the ridiculous cost of living in Shanghai. It is at least twice as expensive as Harbin and substantially more expensive than Beijing. Shanghai can be just as costly any American city. This high cost also brings with it readily accessible luxuries that are hard to find elsewhere in China. There are both a Dunkin Donuts and a Starbucks within a block of my office, and I can eat a sandwich everyday for lunch at a reasonable price if I so choose.
Because expat community is so large, it can’t be the welcoming monolith that it was in Harbin. Everyone has there own groups, so it is a little tougher to break in. Foreigners understand that I’m new and are inviting, but I haven’t really found my place here socially among either the foreigners or the Chinese. Furthermore, it seems like they want to keep living like they are in the West, and I came to China to be in China. I only have this time to take advantage of a uniquely Chinese lifestyle. This maybe be the New York of China, but if I wanted to be in New York for the summer, I would have taken the bus from Boston.
Overall, I think I’m going to enjoy my time here; work will be rewarding, but I don’t think I’m going to be pushed by living here as much as I expected and desired. The city itself is interesting, but I wouldn’t settle here.
This is China Economic Review’s website. http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/
For some Chinglish fun, read the caption to this picture. http://en.chinafotopress.com/index/onephoto?oid=386045621&lid=
Despite not finding the city attractive, I may get out this weekend and take some pictures and post them for your viewing pleasure. Please send me an email to stay in touch: rmm@bu.edu. I would really appreciate it.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
The End of Part I
Grace and I decided to go to Dali and Lijiang after leaving Kunming. Our options from Kunming were to head towards the Himalayas to the northeast or to the Southeast Asian minority villages in the Xishuangbanna Region on the Laos and Burmese borders. We chose the former. When it came time to leave, we couldn’t get beds or seats on a train for the overnight train ride. I persuaded Grace to buy standing tickets and try to get some of the beds released after the train departs. After sitting on our bags by the entrance to the car, we were able to get beds, and we arrived outside of Dali in a city call Xiaguan. It was too early for buses to run, and the cab fares to Dali were exorbitant, so we just ate breakfast at a cafeteria and waited for buses to start running.
Dali is a very attractive tourist city. The city is tucked between mountains and a lake. Everything in the town is built out of gray stone presumably cut from the mountains surrounding the city. Streams from the mountains pass through the city in paths cut from the sidewalks. The old city is contained by a huge wall; tourists stroll on top from guard post to guard post. There are pagodas at every major intersection in the city. Many of the buildings are newly refurbished with the exception of grass growing on top of old terra cotta roofs. Some modern glass buildings were being built away from the main tourist area, and they were impressively integrated with the traditional architecture in the rest of the city.
Consistent with our plan to take a slower pace, we spent an uneventful couple days in Dali. Most of our time was spent walking and eating. One day we negotiated with a local artist to use his supplies to paint for a couple hours. We sat out on the street corner painting pictures of the city. Both Chinese and foreign tourists were quite intrigued; they would stop and watch or chat. I let a little Australian kid “help” me with my painting for a while. It wasn’t a real sacrifice because I’m not much of an artist.
We went to hike up the mountains surrounding the city, but we arrived too late in the day to make the admission fee to the park worthwhile. We also tried to catch a ferry across the lake to some other villages in the area, but when we arrived to the docks, we determined that it wasn’t worth the time and expense. The main excursion of our time there was a bike trip to the village of Xizhou. The village itself wasn’t striking, but we came across a funeral procession. The procession was headed by a casket being carried overhead followed by weeping women. The men trailed, talking and laughing. Grace proposed that people were hired to mourn, and given the melodrama of the women and apathy of the men, her assessment was probably right. We saw another funeral procession a few days later in Dali, and observing the event again supported her hired mourners hypothesis.
A slow bus ride through mountain passes led us to Lijiang. Lijiang is another attractive tourist city. Traditional wooden buildings cover the hills of the old town. Many streams flow through the city, and these streams are too large to be accommodated within the sidewalks. Winding, narrow paths lead to bridges that cut back and forth across the streams. Like Dali, all the buildings were well preserved to please the tourists. Sitting in the background is a solitary snow-covered mountain that dwarfs the smaller mountains around it. The combination of perfectly maintained buildings and the same five types of tourist shops permeating the old town make it feel like Disney’s version of China. All Chinese tourist towns are different in form but the same in substance.
Per Marc’s recommendation, we stayed at a hostel called Mama Naxi’s. Mama ran the hostel and cooked large meals for all the guests every night. Mama referred to herself in broken Chinglish as Mama. At dinner each night, travelers would gather around tables of delicious food and tell each other the generic China backpacker stories about how they were in a minority village, and the villagers took them in and showed them amazing hospitality, and it was the most unforgettable experience. The exception to the rule was a group of MBA students from a school in Shanghai that spoke only in business clichés.
The main attraction in the Lijiang area is the Tiger Leaping Gorge. It is the third largest canyon in the world, and it is a two day hike through the gorge. The gorge is cut out of the far side of the snow-covered mountain by the Yangtze River. Because of the Three Gorges Dam project in Chongqing, it will be filled with water in a couple years. For the majority of the time when we were hiking, the peaks of the mountains were hidden behind the clouds, but for a few minutes at a time, the sky would clear, revealing spectacular views.
Mama provided the transportation to the gorge for all the guests leaving that day, but we had to find our own way back. At the end of the gorge, we could only find a ride back to the beginning of the gorge. From there, we combined forces with some pleasant Polish travelers and rode back to Mama’s. When we returned, one of the guests that left for the gorge a few days before had bandages on his head. He and his friends had hired mules to ride up to the peak. On the climb, his mule slipped. He and the mule fell of the side of the mountain. He fell twenty feet onto a rock flat on his back, and mule nearly landed on top of him. The local guides that were taking them up the mountain ran off as fast as they could. His friends carried him down the mountain to a hostel. They wrapped him in a blanket and found a cab to take him to a hospital. As the cab began to drive off, one of the workers at the hostel jumped in front of the van and demanded that the friends pay about four times the cost of a night at the hostel for the blanket. In no position to debate, they paid, and the driver took them to the medical facility in the town at the beginning of the gorge. It was a concrete block building with no amenities and bloody floors. He stayed there a day getting pain killers. The next day, he was well enough to return to Lijiang. He went to the hospital, and x-rays revealed no broken bones. He had escaped near death with only a concussion.
There is a color picture from Lijiang in the Lonely Planet. There are very few pictures in the Lonely Planet, so a color picture implies that the site is a highlight of the country. The picture from the Black Dragon Pool Park, and it has the pool, a pagoda, and the lone mountain in background. It is a beautiful picture. The park was very unimpressive. We went to the spot where the picture was taken and took the picture ourselves. However, on the day we took our picture, the peak was covered in clouds.
While we were in Lijiang, we decided to leave China. Grace, being relatively uninvested in China, was willing to leave at any time, and I knew it. I had come to China with some subconscious goal of adventure, and China had disappointed. I had held my hopes of China so high that it couldn’t live up. Culturally, China had been remarkably similar. I had reached the conclusion that China wasn’t flawed; there were just things I disliked about living there. The cultural changes in China weren’t inauthentic; they are real and legitimate, but not what I desired. I had invested so much in expectation of getting out of Harbin and backpacking, and following the worn Lonely Planet route just wasn’t what was envisioned. Fellow travelers weren’t interesting and stimulating. Marc and Sven were moving to Kunming. Grace and I had started talking about what our life back in Atlanta would be like. I felt like there was no reason to go back to Harbin and no reason to stay on this trip.
Grace and I decided to leave on the night before Chinese New Year. Next morning, we looked for a way to get back to Kunming and begin our journey back to Harbin. There were no buses leaving that day. I walked from place to place in a near sprint. I was already out of the country. We found an internet café, and I gave Mr. Lu my two weeks notice. My contract had a clause stipulating the amount I had to pay for breach, and the amount was equal to my outstanding pay for one month. That night people were in the main square shooting off fireworks, but the streets were more deserted than usual with most people inside celebrating with their families.
Mama had offered to buy bus tickets to Kunming on our behalf, but from a miscommunication, they had to arrange our bus at the last minute. We got beds on a sleeper bus in the very back. There were two levels of five mats straight across right next to each other. My mat was next to the fat, snoring man. I slept sporadically throughout the night; I laid there thinking about how much I hated this man and how I couldn’t get off the bus. I couldn’t wait for the bus to stop. It felt like the ride took an eternity. I finally pulled my head out of the pillow and looked up. We had stopped. Grace, the snoring man, and I were the only people on the bus. Who knows how long we had been there. Our bags were sitting outside the bus, and we picked them up and moved on to the train station.
We were able to get sleeper tickets on a train to Beijing that night. In the meantime, I returned plane tickets that I had purchased for our return from Kunming to Harbin. Being close to the New Year, plane tickets within China were too expensive if we were going to be able to afford our tickets back to Atlanta. It took three days to get to Beijing. The scenery on the first day of the trip was wonderful. We passed through Guizhou, an area we had contemplated traveling through earlier. The entire province was covered in hills and yellow flowers. It was a great place to ride through, but I was glad we hadn’t traveled there. There was a mother and a child in the bunk next to us. The child was the worst behaved Chinese child I had ever seen. He was about seven years old and was yelling, climbing all over the bunks, and throwing toys. His dad must have been sitting in the hard seat section because he would come around occasionally, and the kid would straighten up. We didn’t have to spend the entire trip enjoying his antics; his family got off about a day and a half into the ride.
Once in Beijing, we immediately took another train to Harbin. From the Harbin train station, we took a cab back to my apartment. We packed everything and went back to the train station without our bags to get tickets back to Beijing. The train station was completely filled. Everyone was traveling from their families back to where they worked after the New Year. All of the twenty or so ticket lines extended out of the train station. Some people would walk past the lines straight to the front. I wasn’t pleased with the exceptions they were taking to the rules. I started grabbing people on the back of the collar and telling them to wait as they tried to walk to the front of my line. A soldier that was monitoring the lines came to investigate the commotion once. He supported me, but having a soldier involved at all made me nervous.
There were no trains back to Beijing for four days. I was in a rush to get out of the country, so this was unacceptable. There is no designated bus station in Harbin; buses just line the streets around the train station. A system of middlemen developed to get people to the buses for their destination for a commission. We tacitly employed one of these touts to find us a bus, and for about an hour, there appeared to be nothing for less than the price of a plane ticket. Finally, we found a bus going to Beijing and Tianjin for double the normal price, and this was a good deal in the circumstances. We went back home to grab our bags and get on the bus. When we came back, we tried to buy the tickets without the help of our middleman to avoid the commission, but we were spotted. That was another moment that I am not proud of looking back. Given the cost of our tickets (and our whiteness was probably a factor as well), we displaced two people from beds onto the floor.
The bus never actually entered Beijing. It approached the Beijing suburbs on the freeway to Tianjin. We were dropped off with one other person on an off ramp in the middle of nowhere before the sun was up. A cab passed by after a few minutes waiting on the side of the road with all our possessions. I asked if he would take us to the Beijing south train station. He laughed, told us no, and drove off. Luckily, the person we were with knew where we were and how to get to the train station. We followed him, dragging suitcases, to a bus stop. Grace was rightfully skeptical about following this guy; Chinese people never concede lack of knowledge when it comes to directions, and it wasn’t worth letting him lead us around aimlessly while lugging our bags. After a couple of bus transfers, we were at the train station an hour and half later. We went to an internet café, pulled out a credit card, and purchased plane tickets back to Atlanta that day. We took the bus from the train station to the airport and we arrived in Atlanta two days later.
It had taken us a week to get from Lijiang to Atlanta: a night from Lijiang to Kunming, three days from Kunming to Beijing, a day each way between Beijing and Harbin, and a day real time to fly to Atlanta.
Dali is a very attractive tourist city. The city is tucked between mountains and a lake. Everything in the town is built out of gray stone presumably cut from the mountains surrounding the city. Streams from the mountains pass through the city in paths cut from the sidewalks. The old city is contained by a huge wall; tourists stroll on top from guard post to guard post. There are pagodas at every major intersection in the city. Many of the buildings are newly refurbished with the exception of grass growing on top of old terra cotta roofs. Some modern glass buildings were being built away from the main tourist area, and they were impressively integrated with the traditional architecture in the rest of the city.
Consistent with our plan to take a slower pace, we spent an uneventful couple days in Dali. Most of our time was spent walking and eating. One day we negotiated with a local artist to use his supplies to paint for a couple hours. We sat out on the street corner painting pictures of the city. Both Chinese and foreign tourists were quite intrigued; they would stop and watch or chat. I let a little Australian kid “help” me with my painting for a while. It wasn’t a real sacrifice because I’m not much of an artist.
We went to hike up the mountains surrounding the city, but we arrived too late in the day to make the admission fee to the park worthwhile. We also tried to catch a ferry across the lake to some other villages in the area, but when we arrived to the docks, we determined that it wasn’t worth the time and expense. The main excursion of our time there was a bike trip to the village of Xizhou. The village itself wasn’t striking, but we came across a funeral procession. The procession was headed by a casket being carried overhead followed by weeping women. The men trailed, talking and laughing. Grace proposed that people were hired to mourn, and given the melodrama of the women and apathy of the men, her assessment was probably right. We saw another funeral procession a few days later in Dali, and observing the event again supported her hired mourners hypothesis.
A slow bus ride through mountain passes led us to Lijiang. Lijiang is another attractive tourist city. Traditional wooden buildings cover the hills of the old town. Many streams flow through the city, and these streams are too large to be accommodated within the sidewalks. Winding, narrow paths lead to bridges that cut back and forth across the streams. Like Dali, all the buildings were well preserved to please the tourists. Sitting in the background is a solitary snow-covered mountain that dwarfs the smaller mountains around it. The combination of perfectly maintained buildings and the same five types of tourist shops permeating the old town make it feel like Disney’s version of China. All Chinese tourist towns are different in form but the same in substance.
Per Marc’s recommendation, we stayed at a hostel called Mama Naxi’s. Mama ran the hostel and cooked large meals for all the guests every night. Mama referred to herself in broken Chinglish as Mama. At dinner each night, travelers would gather around tables of delicious food and tell each other the generic China backpacker stories about how they were in a minority village, and the villagers took them in and showed them amazing hospitality, and it was the most unforgettable experience. The exception to the rule was a group of MBA students from a school in Shanghai that spoke only in business clichés.
The main attraction in the Lijiang area is the Tiger Leaping Gorge. It is the third largest canyon in the world, and it is a two day hike through the gorge. The gorge is cut out of the far side of the snow-covered mountain by the Yangtze River. Because of the Three Gorges Dam project in Chongqing, it will be filled with water in a couple years. For the majority of the time when we were hiking, the peaks of the mountains were hidden behind the clouds, but for a few minutes at a time, the sky would clear, revealing spectacular views.
Mama provided the transportation to the gorge for all the guests leaving that day, but we had to find our own way back. At the end of the gorge, we could only find a ride back to the beginning of the gorge. From there, we combined forces with some pleasant Polish travelers and rode back to Mama’s. When we returned, one of the guests that left for the gorge a few days before had bandages on his head. He and his friends had hired mules to ride up to the peak. On the climb, his mule slipped. He and the mule fell of the side of the mountain. He fell twenty feet onto a rock flat on his back, and mule nearly landed on top of him. The local guides that were taking them up the mountain ran off as fast as they could. His friends carried him down the mountain to a hostel. They wrapped him in a blanket and found a cab to take him to a hospital. As the cab began to drive off, one of the workers at the hostel jumped in front of the van and demanded that the friends pay about four times the cost of a night at the hostel for the blanket. In no position to debate, they paid, and the driver took them to the medical facility in the town at the beginning of the gorge. It was a concrete block building with no amenities and bloody floors. He stayed there a day getting pain killers. The next day, he was well enough to return to Lijiang. He went to the hospital, and x-rays revealed no broken bones. He had escaped near death with only a concussion.
There is a color picture from Lijiang in the Lonely Planet. There are very few pictures in the Lonely Planet, so a color picture implies that the site is a highlight of the country. The picture from the Black Dragon Pool Park, and it has the pool, a pagoda, and the lone mountain in background. It is a beautiful picture. The park was very unimpressive. We went to the spot where the picture was taken and took the picture ourselves. However, on the day we took our picture, the peak was covered in clouds.
While we were in Lijiang, we decided to leave China. Grace, being relatively uninvested in China, was willing to leave at any time, and I knew it. I had come to China with some subconscious goal of adventure, and China had disappointed. I had held my hopes of China so high that it couldn’t live up. Culturally, China had been remarkably similar. I had reached the conclusion that China wasn’t flawed; there were just things I disliked about living there. The cultural changes in China weren’t inauthentic; they are real and legitimate, but not what I desired. I had invested so much in expectation of getting out of Harbin and backpacking, and following the worn Lonely Planet route just wasn’t what was envisioned. Fellow travelers weren’t interesting and stimulating. Marc and Sven were moving to Kunming. Grace and I had started talking about what our life back in Atlanta would be like. I felt like there was no reason to go back to Harbin and no reason to stay on this trip.
Grace and I decided to leave on the night before Chinese New Year. Next morning, we looked for a way to get back to Kunming and begin our journey back to Harbin. There were no buses leaving that day. I walked from place to place in a near sprint. I was already out of the country. We found an internet café, and I gave Mr. Lu my two weeks notice. My contract had a clause stipulating the amount I had to pay for breach, and the amount was equal to my outstanding pay for one month. That night people were in the main square shooting off fireworks, but the streets were more deserted than usual with most people inside celebrating with their families.
Mama had offered to buy bus tickets to Kunming on our behalf, but from a miscommunication, they had to arrange our bus at the last minute. We got beds on a sleeper bus in the very back. There were two levels of five mats straight across right next to each other. My mat was next to the fat, snoring man. I slept sporadically throughout the night; I laid there thinking about how much I hated this man and how I couldn’t get off the bus. I couldn’t wait for the bus to stop. It felt like the ride took an eternity. I finally pulled my head out of the pillow and looked up. We had stopped. Grace, the snoring man, and I were the only people on the bus. Who knows how long we had been there. Our bags were sitting outside the bus, and we picked them up and moved on to the train station.
We were able to get sleeper tickets on a train to Beijing that night. In the meantime, I returned plane tickets that I had purchased for our return from Kunming to Harbin. Being close to the New Year, plane tickets within China were too expensive if we were going to be able to afford our tickets back to Atlanta. It took three days to get to Beijing. The scenery on the first day of the trip was wonderful. We passed through Guizhou, an area we had contemplated traveling through earlier. The entire province was covered in hills and yellow flowers. It was a great place to ride through, but I was glad we hadn’t traveled there. There was a mother and a child in the bunk next to us. The child was the worst behaved Chinese child I had ever seen. He was about seven years old and was yelling, climbing all over the bunks, and throwing toys. His dad must have been sitting in the hard seat section because he would come around occasionally, and the kid would straighten up. We didn’t have to spend the entire trip enjoying his antics; his family got off about a day and a half into the ride.
Once in Beijing, we immediately took another train to Harbin. From the Harbin train station, we took a cab back to my apartment. We packed everything and went back to the train station without our bags to get tickets back to Beijing. The train station was completely filled. Everyone was traveling from their families back to where they worked after the New Year. All of the twenty or so ticket lines extended out of the train station. Some people would walk past the lines straight to the front. I wasn’t pleased with the exceptions they were taking to the rules. I started grabbing people on the back of the collar and telling them to wait as they tried to walk to the front of my line. A soldier that was monitoring the lines came to investigate the commotion once. He supported me, but having a soldier involved at all made me nervous.
There were no trains back to Beijing for four days. I was in a rush to get out of the country, so this was unacceptable. There is no designated bus station in Harbin; buses just line the streets around the train station. A system of middlemen developed to get people to the buses for their destination for a commission. We tacitly employed one of these touts to find us a bus, and for about an hour, there appeared to be nothing for less than the price of a plane ticket. Finally, we found a bus going to Beijing and Tianjin for double the normal price, and this was a good deal in the circumstances. We went back home to grab our bags and get on the bus. When we came back, we tried to buy the tickets without the help of our middleman to avoid the commission, but we were spotted. That was another moment that I am not proud of looking back. Given the cost of our tickets (and our whiteness was probably a factor as well), we displaced two people from beds onto the floor.
The bus never actually entered Beijing. It approached the Beijing suburbs on the freeway to Tianjin. We were dropped off with one other person on an off ramp in the middle of nowhere before the sun was up. A cab passed by after a few minutes waiting on the side of the road with all our possessions. I asked if he would take us to the Beijing south train station. He laughed, told us no, and drove off. Luckily, the person we were with knew where we were and how to get to the train station. We followed him, dragging suitcases, to a bus stop. Grace was rightfully skeptical about following this guy; Chinese people never concede lack of knowledge when it comes to directions, and it wasn’t worth letting him lead us around aimlessly while lugging our bags. After a couple of bus transfers, we were at the train station an hour and half later. We went to an internet café, pulled out a credit card, and purchased plane tickets back to Atlanta that day. We took the bus from the train station to the airport and we arrived in Atlanta two days later.
It had taken us a week to get from Lijiang to Atlanta: a night from Lijiang to Kunming, three days from Kunming to Beijing, a day each way between Beijing and Harbin, and a day real time to fly to Atlanta.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Kunming
From Beihai, we went to Kunming. We took a bus from Beihai to Nanning, milled around for the day, and took a night train to Kunming. We got second class sleeper tickets, and our beds were next to two other travelers from England. One was a student in Shanghai, and the other was his girlfriend who was just visiting. After chatting for a while, they pulled out some Havarti cheese as part of their dinner which we stared at lustily. The only cheese we had eaten in China were Kraft singles, so just pulling out good cheese for dinner on a train seemed like an incredible luxury to us.
Kunming is a wonderful city. The weather was warmer and sunnier than anywhere we had been, and there was much less air pollution that other large cities. The streets are relatively clean, and the downtown is filled with shiny, new skyscrapers and shops. The food is diverse and delicious. The highlight of Kunming cuisine is the fried bread made by the large Muslim minority in the city. We were so impressed with the city that we contemplated moving there with Marc and Sven for the second semester, but ultimately I decided I didn't want to leave my job in Harbin because I didn't know if I could find work after breaking a contract.
There aren't that many tourist sites in Kunming. There are two tall pagodas in the newly restored old town that have many upward sloping tiers that look unlike those elsewhere in China. We spent an afternoon at a temple watching people venerating the Buddhas in Western clothes and wondered why they were appealing to the Buddhas. Were they seeking enlightenment, solutions to social problems, or a new cell phone? In addition to the Chinese temple, there was a Thai temple in the back of the complex donated by the Thai government.
The most interesting part of Kunming was the Yunnan Museum. There were extensive English captions for all the exhibits, and they revealed the dynamics of cultural judgment within China. Most the exhibits focused on the Dian Kingdom, its culture, and its regional dominance in Southeast Asia and compared these achievements directly to those of the mainstream Chinese. One of the captions said, "This proves that Yunnan Province was not the cultural backwater it was once thought to be." Clearly the museum was out to address the cultural dismissal of the rest of China. If that was the goal, then it succeeded in persuading me; I was impressed by the art and artifacts we saw there.
Everywhere in China, there are frustrations, and this stop was no exception. We were trying to get to a particular bus stop, got on a bus, and asked the driver if the bus went there. She told us it did, so we got on. After riding the bus for an hour out of the city to a lake and never hearing our stop announced, the route ended. I approached the bus driver and asked her why she had told us that we could get where we were going on this bus when we clearly couldn't. She had no answer and just told us we could get there by going back into town to where we were going on another bus and making a connection. However, most of the frustrations were caused by the Lonely Planet in this case. Once it led us to a restaurant that no longer existed, and on another occasion our destination was misplaced on our map in the book. We began to become distrustful of the the Lonely Planet especially after it so highly recommended traveling through those minority villages that we found lacking in sights and entertainment and inconvenient in getting to.
We saw some very interesting beggars in Kunming. There were many people out on the street bowed with there face on the pavement and stories in front of them. Their stories said that they needed money for university, their family was sick, and so on. It was like a voluntary welfare system. Also, we saw a man sitting in a basket on the sidewalk who had no body below his ribcage. Surely it was no hoax; he was right there on the sidewalk with nowhere to hide his legs. There are many child beggars in the city; no so much out of necessity but more as a form of child labor. These children are very clean and well dressed and are playing with toys when they aren't begging. Grace said that she had seen one playing with a toy makeup kit. We were told that they are from minority villages outside the city, and when get money, they take the fruits of their labor back to their mothers who are waiting nearby. Several times when we were walking around, these children approached me and grabbed on to my legs. I told them to go away or forcibly removed them, and nothing came of it. The Chinese generally dropped them a few coins, and the kids would go away satisfied.
One night, we were walking back to our hostel through a busy square, and an older child of about seven approached me and latched on to my leg. The techniques I had used before were unable to get me out of this situation; his grip was too strong to peal him off. I just started walking away with him attached to my leg, but I had to stop when I realized he was just going to hang on there all night if thats what it took. I stopped and told him again to go away and I wouldn't give him any money. He started to loudly fake crying; the performance was terribly unconvincing, but I didn't want to draw that much negative attention to myself. I asked him if he was hungry; he said yes. I told him that I would by him food but would give him any money. He took that as an acceptable agreement, and I went to a nearby vendor and bought him a half kilo of candied peanuts. Our hostel had a balcony overlooking the square, so we ran up and looked for what was happening to our peanuts. The child had brought the food to a group of three mothers who were eating the peanuts and distributing them to the children as they saw fit.
Kunming is a wonderful city. The weather was warmer and sunnier than anywhere we had been, and there was much less air pollution that other large cities. The streets are relatively clean, and the downtown is filled with shiny, new skyscrapers and shops. The food is diverse and delicious. The highlight of Kunming cuisine is the fried bread made by the large Muslim minority in the city. We were so impressed with the city that we contemplated moving there with Marc and Sven for the second semester, but ultimately I decided I didn't want to leave my job in Harbin because I didn't know if I could find work after breaking a contract.
There aren't that many tourist sites in Kunming. There are two tall pagodas in the newly restored old town that have many upward sloping tiers that look unlike those elsewhere in China. We spent an afternoon at a temple watching people venerating the Buddhas in Western clothes and wondered why they were appealing to the Buddhas. Were they seeking enlightenment, solutions to social problems, or a new cell phone? In addition to the Chinese temple, there was a Thai temple in the back of the complex donated by the Thai government.
The most interesting part of Kunming was the Yunnan Museum. There were extensive English captions for all the exhibits, and they revealed the dynamics of cultural judgment within China. Most the exhibits focused on the Dian Kingdom, its culture, and its regional dominance in Southeast Asia and compared these achievements directly to those of the mainstream Chinese. One of the captions said, "This proves that Yunnan Province was not the cultural backwater it was once thought to be." Clearly the museum was out to address the cultural dismissal of the rest of China. If that was the goal, then it succeeded in persuading me; I was impressed by the art and artifacts we saw there.
Everywhere in China, there are frustrations, and this stop was no exception. We were trying to get to a particular bus stop, got on a bus, and asked the driver if the bus went there. She told us it did, so we got on. After riding the bus for an hour out of the city to a lake and never hearing our stop announced, the route ended. I approached the bus driver and asked her why she had told us that we could get where we were going on this bus when we clearly couldn't. She had no answer and just told us we could get there by going back into town to where we were going on another bus and making a connection. However, most of the frustrations were caused by the Lonely Planet in this case. Once it led us to a restaurant that no longer existed, and on another occasion our destination was misplaced on our map in the book. We began to become distrustful of the the Lonely Planet especially after it so highly recommended traveling through those minority villages that we found lacking in sights and entertainment and inconvenient in getting to.
We saw some very interesting beggars in Kunming. There were many people out on the street bowed with there face on the pavement and stories in front of them. Their stories said that they needed money for university, their family was sick, and so on. It was like a voluntary welfare system. Also, we saw a man sitting in a basket on the sidewalk who had no body below his ribcage. Surely it was no hoax; he was right there on the sidewalk with nowhere to hide his legs. There are many child beggars in the city; no so much out of necessity but more as a form of child labor. These children are very clean and well dressed and are playing with toys when they aren't begging. Grace said that she had seen one playing with a toy makeup kit. We were told that they are from minority villages outside the city, and when get money, they take the fruits of their labor back to their mothers who are waiting nearby. Several times when we were walking around, these children approached me and grabbed on to my legs. I told them to go away or forcibly removed them, and nothing came of it. The Chinese generally dropped them a few coins, and the kids would go away satisfied.
One night, we were walking back to our hostel through a busy square, and an older child of about seven approached me and latched on to my leg. The techniques I had used before were unable to get me out of this situation; his grip was too strong to peal him off. I just started walking away with him attached to my leg, but I had to stop when I realized he was just going to hang on there all night if thats what it took. I stopped and told him again to go away and I wouldn't give him any money. He started to loudly fake crying; the performance was terribly unconvincing, but I didn't want to draw that much negative attention to myself. I asked him if he was hungry; he said yes. I told him that I would by him food but would give him any money. He took that as an acceptable agreement, and I went to a nearby vendor and bought him a half kilo of candied peanuts. Our hostel had a balcony overlooking the square, so we ran up and looked for what was happening to our peanuts. The child had brought the food to a group of three mothers who were eating the peanuts and distributing them to the children as they saw fit.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Beihai
Grace and I completely changed our plans for the trip at this point. We chose to forgo traveling through Guizhou Province, one of the least developed provinces in China, and went south to Beihai. Beihai is the second choice in China for beaches to Sanya in Hainan Province. We opted Beihai because it was much closer and more accessible. Nonetheless, it took three bus routes and a day of travel to get from Chouyang to Beihai. Along the way, we passed pretty close to the Guangzhou/Shenzhen/Hong Kong metropolis, and we saw a crate strapped to the back of a motorcycle stuffed beyond full capacity with about ten yellow dogs headed towards the city. Presumably they were for eating because there are puppy markets in the cities for pet dogs.
We intended to just sit on the beach and relax for a couple days in relative comfort, and we accomplished this goal. However, the little hassles in business transactions while we were there were more numerous than I had come to expect. When we arrived, it was already late, and we wanted to go from the bus station to a hotel near the beach. We asked a taxi driver how much it would cost for a ride, and the price was exorbitant for the distance we needed to go. We walked away, but the taxi kept following us for about 20 minutes while we tried to get directions. We finally found another taxi that would give us a ride at a reasonable price.
The taxi driver took us to a hotel that he thought would be in our price range. It was low season; nothing was happening there at all, so we had a good position to bargain. The hotel he took us to was much nicer than we expected. We got the price down to a quarter of what it was when we walked in the door, but it was still too expensive for our budget. We had to walk a long way down the beach past many nice hotels in order to find an acceptable place.
We also had some problems with restaurants. One place gave us twice as much food as we asked for and tried to charge us for it. Another place tried to charge us for tea that we didn't ask for and is generally free everywhere. A little discussion when the bill arrived resolved these issues.
Another inconvenience that is more troubling when I look back on it involved a tricycle taxi. Grace and I were searching for a restaurant, and we couldn't find it. We received directions back and forth in the same area, and eventually we decided to give up and get a ride from one of the bike taxis just to get us there. I asked a guy on one of the taxis if he knew the place and would take us there for two yuan, and he hurried us and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on." While we were riding, he was talking to the other bike taxis drivers about giving a ride to foreigners and laughing. The ride took about ten minutes, and when we got there, our driver told us that it would cost ten yuan. I told him I would give him two because thats what we agreed to. The driver and I bantered back and forth in decreasing value: ten...two...nine...two...eight...two... and so on all the way down until we arrived at two. The doorman at the restaurant got involved and argued in the favor of the driver. I only had a ten, so I made him swap my change at the same time.
I think this situation was the peak expression of my bitterness, contentiousness, and paranoia about being taken advantage of. The service provided was worth more than I gave him by any standard in China, but I was too blinded by my desire for price equity with the locals and to have the agreement upheld to be fair to this man. I lost perspective that I had given him a quarter. And to make him swap money at the same time, how offensive! I'm very ashamed that was unable to continue to treat people with dignity under the stresses of China.
There is a restaurant called Tommy's in Beihai run by an Australian by the same name. The food was excellent and very reasonable for Western food; it was so good that we went twice. We got to meet the man himself and have a long conversation. He is in his sixties and married to a Chinese woman twenty or thirty years his junior who is runs the restaurant. He told us about the different work he had done in China and his farm in Australia. He talked a lot about the benefits and detriments of doing business in China. At one point he was talking about violent crime and made a funny comment about crime in the US. He said it is really safe in China especially compared to the US where everyone is carrying guns and shooting each other every time they get angry. I didn't want to contradict him and tell him that it wasn't exactly like he imagined it.
The city itself is very clean and attractive. It was the southernmost stop on our trip, and you could tell in the lush, green trees around town, the diversity of produce available in the markets, and the comfortable weather. There is an old town in the city that looks very Western, so it is possible that the city was once a colony. The buildings in the old town are very attractive with high windows and broad arches over the doorway. However, the Chinese were remodeling and restoring some of the buildings, and they replaced the old facades with bathroom tile and squared off the arches. I wonder who though it was an improvement.
Grace celebrated her twentieth birthday while we were in Beihai. She had always had large themed parties for her last couple of birthdays, so our festivities were significantly different than what she was accustomed to. We went to a nice Chinese bakery and picked out a cake in advance. Trying to figure out what was inside the cakes in pictures was challenging, but we eventually decided on a chocolate cake. When we got the cake, it was big and full of mousse. We enjoyed eating the whole thing ourselves over several days, but at home, we probably wouldn't have been so excited about it. All in all, it was a good couple of days for rest and relaxation.
We intended to just sit on the beach and relax for a couple days in relative comfort, and we accomplished this goal. However, the little hassles in business transactions while we were there were more numerous than I had come to expect. When we arrived, it was already late, and we wanted to go from the bus station to a hotel near the beach. We asked a taxi driver how much it would cost for a ride, and the price was exorbitant for the distance we needed to go. We walked away, but the taxi kept following us for about 20 minutes while we tried to get directions. We finally found another taxi that would give us a ride at a reasonable price.
The taxi driver took us to a hotel that he thought would be in our price range. It was low season; nothing was happening there at all, so we had a good position to bargain. The hotel he took us to was much nicer than we expected. We got the price down to a quarter of what it was when we walked in the door, but it was still too expensive for our budget. We had to walk a long way down the beach past many nice hotels in order to find an acceptable place.
We also had some problems with restaurants. One place gave us twice as much food as we asked for and tried to charge us for it. Another place tried to charge us for tea that we didn't ask for and is generally free everywhere. A little discussion when the bill arrived resolved these issues.
Another inconvenience that is more troubling when I look back on it involved a tricycle taxi. Grace and I were searching for a restaurant, and we couldn't find it. We received directions back and forth in the same area, and eventually we decided to give up and get a ride from one of the bike taxis just to get us there. I asked a guy on one of the taxis if he knew the place and would take us there for two yuan, and he hurried us and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on." While we were riding, he was talking to the other bike taxis drivers about giving a ride to foreigners and laughing. The ride took about ten minutes, and when we got there, our driver told us that it would cost ten yuan. I told him I would give him two because thats what we agreed to. The driver and I bantered back and forth in decreasing value: ten...two...nine...two...eight...two... and so on all the way down until we arrived at two. The doorman at the restaurant got involved and argued in the favor of the driver. I only had a ten, so I made him swap my change at the same time.
I think this situation was the peak expression of my bitterness, contentiousness, and paranoia about being taken advantage of. The service provided was worth more than I gave him by any standard in China, but I was too blinded by my desire for price equity with the locals and to have the agreement upheld to be fair to this man. I lost perspective that I had given him a quarter. And to make him swap money at the same time, how offensive! I'm very ashamed that was unable to continue to treat people with dignity under the stresses of China.
There is a restaurant called Tommy's in Beihai run by an Australian by the same name. The food was excellent and very reasonable for Western food; it was so good that we went twice. We got to meet the man himself and have a long conversation. He is in his sixties and married to a Chinese woman twenty or thirty years his junior who is runs the restaurant. He told us about the different work he had done in China and his farm in Australia. He talked a lot about the benefits and detriments of doing business in China. At one point he was talking about violent crime and made a funny comment about crime in the US. He said it is really safe in China especially compared to the US where everyone is carrying guns and shooting each other every time they get angry. I didn't want to contradict him and tell him that it wasn't exactly like he imagined it.
The city itself is very clean and attractive. It was the southernmost stop on our trip, and you could tell in the lush, green trees around town, the diversity of produce available in the markets, and the comfortable weather. There is an old town in the city that looks very Western, so it is possible that the city was once a colony. The buildings in the old town are very attractive with high windows and broad arches over the doorway. However, the Chinese were remodeling and restoring some of the buildings, and they replaced the old facades with bathroom tile and squared off the arches. I wonder who though it was an improvement.
Grace celebrated her twentieth birthday while we were in Beihai. She had always had large themed parties for her last couple of birthdays, so our festivities were significantly different than what she was accustomed to. We went to a nice Chinese bakery and picked out a cake in advance. Trying to figure out what was inside the cakes in pictures was challenging, but we eventually decided on a chocolate cake. When we got the cake, it was big and full of mousse. We enjoyed eating the whole thing ourselves over several days, but at home, we probably wouldn't have been so excited about it. All in all, it was a good couple of days for rest and relaxation.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Chouyang
Grace and I were off the next morning. We hopped on a bus from Longsheng to Sanjiang from there we would head to the village of Chouyang. The bus ride to Sanjiang took four hours alongside a road that was under construction. The road we traversed was a muddy dirt road with crater pot holes. The seating was hard and cramped and came with all the extra cargo we were coming to expect traveling through rural China. After stretching out on arrival, we took a blue box, three-wheeled, motorcycle taxi to another bus station in Sanjiang where we could catch our next bus to Chouyang. The ride to Chouyang was shorter and much more comfortable.
Chouyang is a village of the Dong minority. The attraction there is the Chouyang Wind and Rain Bridge. The roof of the bridge forms five peaks each with three tiers. Their buildings are similar to the Yao architecture we observed at the Longji Rice terraces, simple, yellow wooden buildings with black roofs. The most interesting thing about the village is the engineering of the water wheels. In order to get water from the stream into their rice terraces, they built water wheels that alternate between paddles and bamboo tubes arranged at such angle where they would scoop water out of the river, and when the tube full of water reached the top of the wheel, it would dump the water into a large wooden bucket. The bucket is connected to bamboo pipes that run to the top of the rice terraces. Water would run from the highest terraces all the way back down to the river filling up all the paddies on its way.
We checked into another wooden hotel and ventured out into the village to take a look around. We snapped a couple pictures of the bridge and encircled the village in a few minutes. Later on there was a dance performance in the center of the village. Group of about twenty men and women danced, played instruments, and sang while in their traditional clothing. The men played what looked like giant, freestanding, bamboo bassoons. Tiny old women slid through the crowd selling lucky, minority 'danglies'. The Chinese tourists readily purchased these souvenirs. One of the dances was a hopscotch through bamboo poles being bounced together. There was an audience participation part during this dance, and I couldn't handle the pressure and jumped through the poles awkwardly.
After the show, Grace and I took another stroll through the village. While we were walking through one of the vegetable gardens, we saw the master of ceremonies going home. Her attire was marked different than during the ceremony. She wore a stylish pink, plaid blazer with trendy jeans and high-heel boots. Clearly the the minority clothing she had sported during the performance wasn't her choice of attire.
That evening we ate dinner at our hotel with another group of people. It was a guided tour from Hanoi to Hong Kong of mostly English tourists. The guide was an American girl who had gotten the job after living in China for a couple of years. Some of the tourist were on around the world trips, and one couple was taking out loans to fund their globe trotting. After a while, Grace and I got tired of their company and retired to drink some beers by ourselves. We talked a lot about our general dissatisfaction with our travels to that point. Our plans had been to continue traveling through Dong minority villages into southeastern Guizhou Province per Lonely Planet's recommendation, but the idea of more bone-jarring bus rides to villages where we could see everything there in a matter of minutes didn't seem very appealing. We resolved to head south to the beach and recharge. That night I asked Grace if she wanted to leave China and go home. I don't remember how the conversation went, but we resolved to stay and bedded down for another freezing night.
Chouyang is a village of the Dong minority. The attraction there is the Chouyang Wind and Rain Bridge. The roof of the bridge forms five peaks each with three tiers. Their buildings are similar to the Yao architecture we observed at the Longji Rice terraces, simple, yellow wooden buildings with black roofs. The most interesting thing about the village is the engineering of the water wheels. In order to get water from the stream into their rice terraces, they built water wheels that alternate between paddles and bamboo tubes arranged at such angle where they would scoop water out of the river, and when the tube full of water reached the top of the wheel, it would dump the water into a large wooden bucket. The bucket is connected to bamboo pipes that run to the top of the rice terraces. Water would run from the highest terraces all the way back down to the river filling up all the paddies on its way.
We checked into another wooden hotel and ventured out into the village to take a look around. We snapped a couple pictures of the bridge and encircled the village in a few minutes. Later on there was a dance performance in the center of the village. Group of about twenty men and women danced, played instruments, and sang while in their traditional clothing. The men played what looked like giant, freestanding, bamboo bassoons. Tiny old women slid through the crowd selling lucky, minority 'danglies'. The Chinese tourists readily purchased these souvenirs. One of the dances was a hopscotch through bamboo poles being bounced together. There was an audience participation part during this dance, and I couldn't handle the pressure and jumped through the poles awkwardly.
After the show, Grace and I took another stroll through the village. While we were walking through one of the vegetable gardens, we saw the master of ceremonies going home. Her attire was marked different than during the ceremony. She wore a stylish pink, plaid blazer with trendy jeans and high-heel boots. Clearly the the minority clothing she had sported during the performance wasn't her choice of attire.
That evening we ate dinner at our hotel with another group of people. It was a guided tour from Hanoi to Hong Kong of mostly English tourists. The guide was an American girl who had gotten the job after living in China for a couple of years. Some of the tourist were on around the world trips, and one couple was taking out loans to fund their globe trotting. After a while, Grace and I got tired of their company and retired to drink some beers by ourselves. We talked a lot about our general dissatisfaction with our travels to that point. Our plans had been to continue traveling through Dong minority villages into southeastern Guizhou Province per Lonely Planet's recommendation, but the idea of more bone-jarring bus rides to villages where we could see everything there in a matter of minutes didn't seem very appealing. We resolved to head south to the beach and recharge. That night I asked Grace if she wanted to leave China and go home. I don't remember how the conversation went, but we resolved to stay and bedded down for another freezing night.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Longji Rice Terraces
Foreword: The last couple of post are going to be made from notes I made while traveling. I didn't write the narrative as it occurred, so the events that are described are more or less as I remember over a year later which may not be as they actually happened. I hope to abridge these posts for my sake as well as your's because you've surely found the amount of detail in my writing tedious, but it probably won't happen. Without further ado...
The next morning we got on a bus back to Guilin to retrieve Grace's visa and check on our stolen bikes. As we pulled back in to the Guilin city limits, traffic slowed. There was a small bus stopped with all its passengers standing outside. Pedestrians had gathered around as well to see a man sprawled in front of the bus, surely dead, and surely a daily occurrence across the country.
We return to the visa office and got Grace's passport without any hassle. We then stopped by the hostel where we rented our bikes so briefly before they were stolen. They said that they weren't recovered, but I could never be sure if that was true given the stake they had in the bikes not being recovered (or at least not letting us know that they had them back). Relatively unfazed, we hopped on another bus bound for the Longji Rice Terraces.
To get to the terraces, we had to change buses in Longsheng. The road to Longsheng wound along the steep slopes beside a river, and the ride was slightly stressful given the general driving standards. When we arrived in the city, I asked around for a bus to the terraces and Pingan, the village where we planned to stay that night. We found our bus, and women in traditional minority garb immediately approached us trying to get to stay at the hotel of their choosing. They kept pointing to themselves saying "Yao people" to advertise that they were in fact minorities. After declining there offers several times, the lady who attempted the most communication with handful of English words kept inching closer to Grace and invading her "personal space". Exasperated, Grace said to her quickly, "You people are so rude. Leave us alone." Confused by the onslaught of English, they looked at one and other, and the ring leader looked back to us with comprehension and said, "Yao people".
The bus quickly filled up with people, giant sacks of rice, rebar, and everything else. I ended up standing for the first leg of the ride. People periodically hopped off and eventually we arrived at the village with a few remaining minorities. There was a small group of minority women waiting. They met us with greetings of, "Hello; money." They offered pictures of lodging and motioned that they would carry our packs for us for a fee. These women certainly did not receive all the nutrients they needed with their strict diet of rice. They were all five feet tall at best, and our packs were already a bit too heavy for our toned American bodies. We walked away up a hill and negotiated a very low price for a room. It was low season. We were probably the only foreigners in town at the moment, and whatever we offered was better than the nothing that they would get otherwise.
The next morning we got to see the village in daylight. The buildings were made entirely of blond wood in a style of architecture totally unlike that of the concrete block buildings of most of China. The first story of these buildings were generally smaller than the second creating an overhang going to the door. Unlike concrete, the wood didn't prove to be a good insulator; our previous night was freezing. I had been making a habit of getting colder in the south than I had ever been in Harbin. People were up and about, and there was a gathering around an unfinished building. Men were standing on top of the building throwing trinkets in a Mardi Gras of sorts. The women and children on the ground were dressed in traditional clothing for the occasion and gathered up the far flung prizes. There were many other unfinished buildings, presumably more lodging for the next high tourist season.
At sometime in the morning, we realized that we were not in Pingan but another smaller village, Dazhai. Since our guide had told us that Pingan was the larger and and more impressive village, we decided to hike there. We asked around for directions, and instead we received offers to carry our packs or walk with us as our guide. Eventually, we just set out by ourselves, and encountered some people working on a building outside the village that pointed us in the right direction. Again, these people were in traditional clothing, and considering the dearth of tourists, they were probably wearing the clothes for their own sake instead of trying to be a show.
The Lonely Planet told us our hike would be four or five hours. It took us eight with our heavy packs going up and down steep hills on dirt paths. It was exhausting, but there were plenty of great views. The sides of the large hills were covered in an elaborate pattern of rice terraces. Longji means dragon's backbone, and it would be easy to picture these terraces as the scale armor sharply running down the back of the giant dragon of the hillside.
Finally we arrived exhausted in Pingan. Pingan was much larger as the result of being the center of tourism for the terraces. Most of the building were built in the same traditional style as hostels or bars for tourists. We decided that there was no point in staying another night here, so we decided to immediately take the bus back to Longsheng. From Longsheng, we could catch the bus to our next destination the next morning. We walked down through the village, past the hostels, bars, and souvenir vendors down to the bus stop only to find that the last bus into town had already left not long ago. It was time to sit down and rest.
As we were sitting at the bus stop, we noticed another bus. I went and talked to a women working on the bus about taking us back. She said that this bus already finished running, but they would take us half way to town and drop us off in another village for twice the price of a normal ticket. After haggling to no avail, we decided it would be best to stay in village that night. We assumed our position at the bus stop again to continue resting.
A group of Chinese tourists approached and one of them told us that the buses we no longer running. I told them thanks and that we knew. Then she ran back to her group, asked them a question, and ran back to us. She asked if we wanted to ride with them. After looking to Grace for approval, we decided to take the free ride. As we were walking to their car, the woman that was working on the bus took note of the tourists giving us a ride. She approached the driver of the car, and a long, heated argument ensued. The argument was too fast and aggressive for me to understand, but I assume that the woman felt that the tourists were taking money out of her pocket by providing her under the table service to us for free. Ultimately, it was the driver that backed down and told us that he could not give us a ride. We refused the bus ride once again and assumed our seats at the bus stop to continue resting.
About fifteen minutes later, another group of Chinese tourists walked by, and a woman in the group told us that there are no more buses. Emboldened by our first experience, I asked if we could get a ride to Longsheng with them. She asked her group and told us that they could. We threw our bags in the trunk of a mid-sized Kia and slid into the back set. Never has a mid-sized sedan with cloth seats seemed so luxurious. We sat in perfect comfort listening to a very interesting Chinese singer-songwriter on CD, and chatting with our gracious hosts. They were from Nanning on a weekend trip, and they were on their way to a thermal spa in the area. They dropped us at the bus station in Longsheng, and we quickly found a good hotel for the night.
You may be asking yourself, "Why did you take a ride from complete strangers? Don't you think that is dangerous?" I think the context of hitchhiking in China is very different. In the US, any old ax murder owns a car. In China, you are in the top ten percent if you can afford a car; we were just kids with backpacks. They had very little to gain from us in the situation, and that to me is the ultimate factor to judge whether to trust someone or not in China. Furthermore, violent crime is extremely exceptional across China. There was certainly a risk, but we judged it to be a very low one.
The next morning we got on a bus back to Guilin to retrieve Grace's visa and check on our stolen bikes. As we pulled back in to the Guilin city limits, traffic slowed. There was a small bus stopped with all its passengers standing outside. Pedestrians had gathered around as well to see a man sprawled in front of the bus, surely dead, and surely a daily occurrence across the country.
We return to the visa office and got Grace's passport without any hassle. We then stopped by the hostel where we rented our bikes so briefly before they were stolen. They said that they weren't recovered, but I could never be sure if that was true given the stake they had in the bikes not being recovered (or at least not letting us know that they had them back). Relatively unfazed, we hopped on another bus bound for the Longji Rice Terraces.
To get to the terraces, we had to change buses in Longsheng. The road to Longsheng wound along the steep slopes beside a river, and the ride was slightly stressful given the general driving standards. When we arrived in the city, I asked around for a bus to the terraces and Pingan, the village where we planned to stay that night. We found our bus, and women in traditional minority garb immediately approached us trying to get to stay at the hotel of their choosing. They kept pointing to themselves saying "Yao people" to advertise that they were in fact minorities. After declining there offers several times, the lady who attempted the most communication with handful of English words kept inching closer to Grace and invading her "personal space". Exasperated, Grace said to her quickly, "You people are so rude. Leave us alone." Confused by the onslaught of English, they looked at one and other, and the ring leader looked back to us with comprehension and said, "Yao people".
The bus quickly filled up with people, giant sacks of rice, rebar, and everything else. I ended up standing for the first leg of the ride. People periodically hopped off and eventually we arrived at the village with a few remaining minorities. There was a small group of minority women waiting. They met us with greetings of, "Hello; money." They offered pictures of lodging and motioned that they would carry our packs for us for a fee. These women certainly did not receive all the nutrients they needed with their strict diet of rice. They were all five feet tall at best, and our packs were already a bit too heavy for our toned American bodies. We walked away up a hill and negotiated a very low price for a room. It was low season. We were probably the only foreigners in town at the moment, and whatever we offered was better than the nothing that they would get otherwise.
The next morning we got to see the village in daylight. The buildings were made entirely of blond wood in a style of architecture totally unlike that of the concrete block buildings of most of China. The first story of these buildings were generally smaller than the second creating an overhang going to the door. Unlike concrete, the wood didn't prove to be a good insulator; our previous night was freezing. I had been making a habit of getting colder in the south than I had ever been in Harbin. People were up and about, and there was a gathering around an unfinished building. Men were standing on top of the building throwing trinkets in a Mardi Gras of sorts. The women and children on the ground were dressed in traditional clothing for the occasion and gathered up the far flung prizes. There were many other unfinished buildings, presumably more lodging for the next high tourist season.
At sometime in the morning, we realized that we were not in Pingan but another smaller village, Dazhai. Since our guide had told us that Pingan was the larger and and more impressive village, we decided to hike there. We asked around for directions, and instead we received offers to carry our packs or walk with us as our guide. Eventually, we just set out by ourselves, and encountered some people working on a building outside the village that pointed us in the right direction. Again, these people were in traditional clothing, and considering the dearth of tourists, they were probably wearing the clothes for their own sake instead of trying to be a show.
The Lonely Planet told us our hike would be four or five hours. It took us eight with our heavy packs going up and down steep hills on dirt paths. It was exhausting, but there were plenty of great views. The sides of the large hills were covered in an elaborate pattern of rice terraces. Longji means dragon's backbone, and it would be easy to picture these terraces as the scale armor sharply running down the back of the giant dragon of the hillside.
Finally we arrived exhausted in Pingan. Pingan was much larger as the result of being the center of tourism for the terraces. Most of the building were built in the same traditional style as hostels or bars for tourists. We decided that there was no point in staying another night here, so we decided to immediately take the bus back to Longsheng. From Longsheng, we could catch the bus to our next destination the next morning. We walked down through the village, past the hostels, bars, and souvenir vendors down to the bus stop only to find that the last bus into town had already left not long ago. It was time to sit down and rest.
As we were sitting at the bus stop, we noticed another bus. I went and talked to a women working on the bus about taking us back. She said that this bus already finished running, but they would take us half way to town and drop us off in another village for twice the price of a normal ticket. After haggling to no avail, we decided it would be best to stay in village that night. We assumed our position at the bus stop again to continue resting.
A group of Chinese tourists approached and one of them told us that the buses we no longer running. I told them thanks and that we knew. Then she ran back to her group, asked them a question, and ran back to us. She asked if we wanted to ride with them. After looking to Grace for approval, we decided to take the free ride. As we were walking to their car, the woman that was working on the bus took note of the tourists giving us a ride. She approached the driver of the car, and a long, heated argument ensued. The argument was too fast and aggressive for me to understand, but I assume that the woman felt that the tourists were taking money out of her pocket by providing her under the table service to us for free. Ultimately, it was the driver that backed down and told us that he could not give us a ride. We refused the bus ride once again and assumed our seats at the bus stop to continue resting.
About fifteen minutes later, another group of Chinese tourists walked by, and a woman in the group told us that there are no more buses. Emboldened by our first experience, I asked if we could get a ride to Longsheng with them. She asked her group and told us that they could. We threw our bags in the trunk of a mid-sized Kia and slid into the back set. Never has a mid-sized sedan with cloth seats seemed so luxurious. We sat in perfect comfort listening to a very interesting Chinese singer-songwriter on CD, and chatting with our gracious hosts. They were from Nanning on a weekend trip, and they were on their way to a thermal spa in the area. They dropped us at the bus station in Longsheng, and we quickly found a good hotel for the night.
You may be asking yourself, "Why did you take a ride from complete strangers? Don't you think that is dangerous?" I think the context of hitchhiking in China is very different. In the US, any old ax murder owns a car. In China, you are in the top ten percent if you can afford a car; we were just kids with backpacks. They had very little to gain from us in the situation, and that to me is the ultimate factor to judge whether to trust someone or not in China. Furthermore, violent crime is extremely exceptional across China. There was certainly a risk, but we judged it to be a very low one.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Remainder of our time in Yangshuo
Grace was feeling well enough the next day to take a bike ride. That really means that she felt terrible but didn't want me to sit around for another day. Bike rental was very inexpensive and easy, and we were determined to not get them stolen this time. There were two options for our ride. We could have gone to Moon Hill, a karst mountain with an arch in it with excellent views, or up a small river to a thousand-year-old bridge. The decision was made to go up the river.
It took just under an hour to ride to the river. We turned off of the asphalt road onto a yellow dirt road. The turn off the road was the furthest I traveled in China. I felt like I stumbled into the Jungle Book; this China was completely different from the China I knew from Harbin. Surreal mountains framed tropical vegetation, rice paddies, exotic pools, and the river. Houses were made from yellow mud bricks, and the yellow walls sharply contrasted their black roofs. Electric blue man-made lagoons allowed the locals to practice aquaculture. Old women formed right angles from years of manual labor and calcium deficiency.
Despite the feeling of being removed from the China I had known to that point, clearly life was changing rapidly for the people along the river. Tourism from Yangshuo had prompted the construction of new hotels that were still in progress. Power lines ran along the road from village to village. Along the river, men sat and waited for the chance to give tourists bamboo raft rides.
The ride was long and hard. The road was bumpy and muddy, so riding fast was nearly impossible. Grace tired quickly after being incapacitated for a couple days and began to get sore. It took three to four hours to get to the bridge. As a feat of engineering from a thousand years ago, the bridge was impressive, but aesthetically, it was lacking. We took turns walking up the bridge and looking over the river while the other one looked after the bikes. Just a couple of minutes was satisfactory for perusing the site, and our interests turned to lunch. A woman who was just hanging out near the bridge offered us lunch at a reasonable price. We ate the fried noodles she cooked for us in a tiny gazebo outside of her home by the river.
For the ride back, I proposed taking short cuts through the fields rather than staying on the dirt road. The narrow trails through the fields were raised above the rice paddies and were difficult to ride and navigate. They ultimately proved to not be anything close to shortcuts. There was very little margin of error riding on the trails, and several times our back tires would slide off the trail and into the ride paddies, bring you to an uncomfortable halt against the handle bars. Trails would dead end, be cut off by a fence, and become impassible. We stopped to take a break on a small stone bridge over a creek. Grace broke down into tears from physical stress. She accused me of pushing her too hard. Certainly the route we took was too difficult for her in that condition, but I had no way of knowing that it would be that way.
We worked our way back to the main path along the river after resting, and eventually came to a short cut on an asphalt road. It had us back to Yangshuo in a matter of minutes, cutting an hour or two off of our ride back. We returned our bikes without any hassle.
As we walked back to our hostel, we saw an unusual street performer. There was a little girl resting her chin on a swiveling tripod. He held herself up on the tripod by her chin and spun around with her legs and body bent back so they were parallel to the ground in Cirque du Soleil fashion. The girl was five or six by my estimation and had certainly been trained starting at an age where she had no volition. Grace and I went back for a night's rest to prepare for another day of travel.
It took just under an hour to ride to the river. We turned off of the asphalt road onto a yellow dirt road. The turn off the road was the furthest I traveled in China. I felt like I stumbled into the Jungle Book; this China was completely different from the China I knew from Harbin. Surreal mountains framed tropical vegetation, rice paddies, exotic pools, and the river. Houses were made from yellow mud bricks, and the yellow walls sharply contrasted their black roofs. Electric blue man-made lagoons allowed the locals to practice aquaculture. Old women formed right angles from years of manual labor and calcium deficiency.
Despite the feeling of being removed from the China I had known to that point, clearly life was changing rapidly for the people along the river. Tourism from Yangshuo had prompted the construction of new hotels that were still in progress. Power lines ran along the road from village to village. Along the river, men sat and waited for the chance to give tourists bamboo raft rides.
The ride was long and hard. The road was bumpy and muddy, so riding fast was nearly impossible. Grace tired quickly after being incapacitated for a couple days and began to get sore. It took three to four hours to get to the bridge. As a feat of engineering from a thousand years ago, the bridge was impressive, but aesthetically, it was lacking. We took turns walking up the bridge and looking over the river while the other one looked after the bikes. Just a couple of minutes was satisfactory for perusing the site, and our interests turned to lunch. A woman who was just hanging out near the bridge offered us lunch at a reasonable price. We ate the fried noodles she cooked for us in a tiny gazebo outside of her home by the river.
For the ride back, I proposed taking short cuts through the fields rather than staying on the dirt road. The narrow trails through the fields were raised above the rice paddies and were difficult to ride and navigate. They ultimately proved to not be anything close to shortcuts. There was very little margin of error riding on the trails, and several times our back tires would slide off the trail and into the ride paddies, bring you to an uncomfortable halt against the handle bars. Trails would dead end, be cut off by a fence, and become impassible. We stopped to take a break on a small stone bridge over a creek. Grace broke down into tears from physical stress. She accused me of pushing her too hard. Certainly the route we took was too difficult for her in that condition, but I had no way of knowing that it would be that way.
We worked our way back to the main path along the river after resting, and eventually came to a short cut on an asphalt road. It had us back to Yangshuo in a matter of minutes, cutting an hour or two off of our ride back. We returned our bikes without any hassle.
As we walked back to our hostel, we saw an unusual street performer. There was a little girl resting her chin on a swiveling tripod. He held herself up on the tripod by her chin and spun around with her legs and body bent back so they were parallel to the ground in Cirque du Soleil fashion. The girl was five or six by my estimation and had certainly been trained starting at an age where she had no volition. Grace and I went back for a night's rest to prepare for another day of travel.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
My Current Life
I haven't forgotten about my blog entirely, even though it has been severely neglected. I intend to finish writing about my time in China, but I feel compelled to write about my life as it is currently.
Upon return, the logistics of my life fell into place very quickly. I spent about a week at home before I found a job and cheap place to live. Both of these things came by way of Grace and her relations. Her brother, Jack, was working at a fondue restaurant in Buckhead (one of the nicest neighborhoods in Atlanta), Dante's Down the Hatch, and they were hiring. Also, one of his roommates had graduated from Georgia Tech in December and was looking to move back home to save money. Grace and I moved in with Jack and his three other roommates, John, David, and Casey (female). John and David were old friends from their hometown, and John and Casey both worked at Dante's.
It was very difficult transition into this life at first. Up until this point, I had defined everything about how Grace and I were living; now, I had jumped into her world. For the first week, I was very uncomfortable. It was much harder coming home than going to China. I was living a life that was not my own. I was living and working with her friends. The staff at Dante's was also a very tight-knit group. I was the new kid and the outsider in both phases of life.
However, after that first week of feeling awkward, everything has been very pleasant. Jack and John quickly accepted me as a friend, not just Grace's boyfriend, and the people at Dante's (or 'trons' as we are referred to) were all very warm and welcoming. It was no long before this life began to feel like my own rather than someone else's.
The working I'm doing is certainly less than stimulating. I've been working as a dishwasher and a seater for over two months now. The way the restaurant works is that everyone must start at the bottom regardless of previous service industry experience. Everyone who works there has been a seater and a dishwasher, then a busser, and then a waiter. Several trons have stayed around long enough to become management. I think it is a pretty good system. Everyone working there has empathy for those on the bottom but not necessarily sympathy having been in that position before.
Surprisingly, I've only resented working there once. During my first night working in the 'dish pit', I loathed that I was smart, educated, and capable and that I was scrubbing pots as my job. Since then, I've gotten over myself and enjoyed working at Dante's. I'm finding out that the work I do is not so important, but work environment is very important. Despite doing manual labor, I never dread going into work because the atmosphere is relaxed and the people there are fun to be around. I think this is a change I've undergone in the last couple of years. I really didn't enjoy my last manual labor job, landscaping, at all. Also, I've always considered myself somewhat undisciplined and lazy, but I'm finding out that I'm a much better worker than most. However, I don't think its a good idea to start comparing myself to the people around me rather than what I think I'm capable of.
Even though the task is menial, I have found ways to make my work as a dishwasher mentally stimulating. I'm always looking for ways to get my job done more efficiently, making my time doing dishes a critical thinking activity. It is not a particularly hard exercise in logic, but it at least keeps my mind occupied.
Dante's is filled with characters. There are plenty of trons that have been around for years; some because they are too incompetent to do other jobs, others because they just enjoy working there more than the other jobs they've done. Most of my time is spent with the people at the bottom as well, one of whom being Ronnie, a career dishwasher in his fifties. Everyone feels a certain ambivalence towards him. He is fifty-four years old dishwasher with no hope of advancement or higher pay and makes everyone's time in the kitchen more interesting and humorous with a steady stream of trash talking. He also gets drunk on occasion and comes into work completely incompetent. I think everyone likes him better until you face the consequences of his alcoholism by being overwhelmed with dishes all night as was the case with myself.
Dante considers himself a worldly person, so he tries to hire an internationally diverse staff. I've been spending a lot of time with is a Russian named Maxim. He is here on a student visa but is working two jobs instead of being in school right now. Like many Russians his age, he as left the country to avoid compulsory military service and possible deployment to Chechnya. He is saving a ridiculous amount of money to be able to afford tuition as an international student. His command of English is pretty strong outside of the use of the verb "to be", but he still has a set of stock phrases that compose about 50% of his speech such as, "Be nice," "You mean," "This is bullshit, man," and "You Americans! You teach me to curse!" He too is a teacher of profanity, and I am also trying to learn Russian from him aside from things that would get me beaten if I actually said them to a Russian. There is also another foreign tron, Greg. He is Polish, works two jobs, and is going to school. The two of them talk about girls that come into the restaurant as walking green cards. I really admire both of them for working as much as they do.
Dante's himself may be the biggest character of them all. He was a member of the first Navy SEAL team, and is now in his seventies. He has had the restaurant since 1969, and it has made him absurdly wealthy. He as traveled everywhere by train and lives in a train car. He certainly loves his restaurant aside from just being a means for him to make money; it also provides him people sitting at tables every night that he can corner and talk to. He is notorious for either rejecting or being unaware of political correctness. He also has stock phrases that he uses on customers. For example, when customers lean over the rail to look at his pet crocodiles in the restaurant, he always says, "Don't fall in; there's too much paperwork." He has several stock phrases that he uses with married couples. "I see you've brought you daughter with you," and "I see you've married up," are his favorites.
John told me this story about Dante. One night, a married couple came into the restaurant; the husband was black and the wife was white. He says to the husband, "I see you've married up." Needless to say, they were both appalled. When their waiter came back to the table, they demanded to see a manager about this old man who came up to them and made a racial slur. They demanded to see the owner! They didn't stay for the rest of the meal when that found out that that was the owner.
Over the past two weeks, I've been training to become a busser. This is a big promotion in terms of pay; the bussers at Dante's make as much as the servers. The busser do have longer hours, more physical demand, and the danger of fire and boiling oil for the same pay as servers (I spent last Saturday night in the emergency room with John after some boiling oil sloshed onto his hand), but after getting paid barely over minimum wage as a dishwasher or seater, the money you can take home in one night busing is very appealing. The demand of the job leads to looking at the clock much less while at work, so I'm looking forward to busing regularly. I am so eager to start busing that I have forgone my days off over the last week to continue my training and am on the tenth day of a fifteen consecutive day working streak. It has paid off though because I have three busing shifts on my schedule for next week.
Since Dante's is only open for dinner, I have had time to look for more career oriented jobs. The search was not good. Given my degree with a double major in Philosophy and Religion, the only business jobs were available to me were jobs in sales. I was called in for interviews for selling stocks, insurance to old people, employees to companies, and mortgages. For most of the jobs, I got out of the hiring process before decisions had been made whether they would hire me or not. The one job I actually would have taken was the job selling mortgages, and I didn't get the job.
Disappointed with the opportunities available to me, I have decided to go back to school. I've applied to start going to Georgia State University as early as this summer with the intention of getting a Masters of International Business. I think it is a good plan for me because one of my main fears of going to law school was being tied to a certain area, and studying international business will create more opportunities to work abroad. I'm also going to take my time and take all the class I didn't take because I was trying to graduate. Maybe I'll fill in a couple holes in my philosophical education, take some art or music classes, or learn astrology and palm reading. I'm really excited about having a second college experience with all the knowledge of how to have fun with it I gained the first time around.
It seems strange to me that I still should be in China right now. That life seems more foreign to me right now than it did before I went. I will certainly conclude my tales of travel in China in the next week or two.
Upon return, the logistics of my life fell into place very quickly. I spent about a week at home before I found a job and cheap place to live. Both of these things came by way of Grace and her relations. Her brother, Jack, was working at a fondue restaurant in Buckhead (one of the nicest neighborhoods in Atlanta), Dante's Down the Hatch, and they were hiring. Also, one of his roommates had graduated from Georgia Tech in December and was looking to move back home to save money. Grace and I moved in with Jack and his three other roommates, John, David, and Casey (female). John and David were old friends from their hometown, and John and Casey both worked at Dante's.
It was very difficult transition into this life at first. Up until this point, I had defined everything about how Grace and I were living; now, I had jumped into her world. For the first week, I was very uncomfortable. It was much harder coming home than going to China. I was living a life that was not my own. I was living and working with her friends. The staff at Dante's was also a very tight-knit group. I was the new kid and the outsider in both phases of life.
However, after that first week of feeling awkward, everything has been very pleasant. Jack and John quickly accepted me as a friend, not just Grace's boyfriend, and the people at Dante's (or 'trons' as we are referred to) were all very warm and welcoming. It was no long before this life began to feel like my own rather than someone else's.
The working I'm doing is certainly less than stimulating. I've been working as a dishwasher and a seater for over two months now. The way the restaurant works is that everyone must start at the bottom regardless of previous service industry experience. Everyone who works there has been a seater and a dishwasher, then a busser, and then a waiter. Several trons have stayed around long enough to become management. I think it is a pretty good system. Everyone working there has empathy for those on the bottom but not necessarily sympathy having been in that position before.
Surprisingly, I've only resented working there once. During my first night working in the 'dish pit', I loathed that I was smart, educated, and capable and that I was scrubbing pots as my job. Since then, I've gotten over myself and enjoyed working at Dante's. I'm finding out that the work I do is not so important, but work environment is very important. Despite doing manual labor, I never dread going into work because the atmosphere is relaxed and the people there are fun to be around. I think this is a change I've undergone in the last couple of years. I really didn't enjoy my last manual labor job, landscaping, at all. Also, I've always considered myself somewhat undisciplined and lazy, but I'm finding out that I'm a much better worker than most. However, I don't think its a good idea to start comparing myself to the people around me rather than what I think I'm capable of.
Even though the task is menial, I have found ways to make my work as a dishwasher mentally stimulating. I'm always looking for ways to get my job done more efficiently, making my time doing dishes a critical thinking activity. It is not a particularly hard exercise in logic, but it at least keeps my mind occupied.
Dante's is filled with characters. There are plenty of trons that have been around for years; some because they are too incompetent to do other jobs, others because they just enjoy working there more than the other jobs they've done. Most of my time is spent with the people at the bottom as well, one of whom being Ronnie, a career dishwasher in his fifties. Everyone feels a certain ambivalence towards him. He is fifty-four years old dishwasher with no hope of advancement or higher pay and makes everyone's time in the kitchen more interesting and humorous with a steady stream of trash talking. He also gets drunk on occasion and comes into work completely incompetent. I think everyone likes him better until you face the consequences of his alcoholism by being overwhelmed with dishes all night as was the case with myself.
Dante considers himself a worldly person, so he tries to hire an internationally diverse staff. I've been spending a lot of time with is a Russian named Maxim. He is here on a student visa but is working two jobs instead of being in school right now. Like many Russians his age, he as left the country to avoid compulsory military service and possible deployment to Chechnya. He is saving a ridiculous amount of money to be able to afford tuition as an international student. His command of English is pretty strong outside of the use of the verb "to be", but he still has a set of stock phrases that compose about 50% of his speech such as, "Be nice," "You mean," "This is bullshit, man," and "You Americans! You teach me to curse!" He too is a teacher of profanity, and I am also trying to learn Russian from him aside from things that would get me beaten if I actually said them to a Russian. There is also another foreign tron, Greg. He is Polish, works two jobs, and is going to school. The two of them talk about girls that come into the restaurant as walking green cards. I really admire both of them for working as much as they do.
Dante's himself may be the biggest character of them all. He was a member of the first Navy SEAL team, and is now in his seventies. He has had the restaurant since 1969, and it has made him absurdly wealthy. He as traveled everywhere by train and lives in a train car. He certainly loves his restaurant aside from just being a means for him to make money; it also provides him people sitting at tables every night that he can corner and talk to. He is notorious for either rejecting or being unaware of political correctness. He also has stock phrases that he uses on customers. For example, when customers lean over the rail to look at his pet crocodiles in the restaurant, he always says, "Don't fall in; there's too much paperwork." He has several stock phrases that he uses with married couples. "I see you've brought you daughter with you," and "I see you've married up," are his favorites.
John told me this story about Dante. One night, a married couple came into the restaurant; the husband was black and the wife was white. He says to the husband, "I see you've married up." Needless to say, they were both appalled. When their waiter came back to the table, they demanded to see a manager about this old man who came up to them and made a racial slur. They demanded to see the owner! They didn't stay for the rest of the meal when that found out that that was the owner.
Over the past two weeks, I've been training to become a busser. This is a big promotion in terms of pay; the bussers at Dante's make as much as the servers. The busser do have longer hours, more physical demand, and the danger of fire and boiling oil for the same pay as servers (I spent last Saturday night in the emergency room with John after some boiling oil sloshed onto his hand), but after getting paid barely over minimum wage as a dishwasher or seater, the money you can take home in one night busing is very appealing. The demand of the job leads to looking at the clock much less while at work, so I'm looking forward to busing regularly. I am so eager to start busing that I have forgone my days off over the last week to continue my training and am on the tenth day of a fifteen consecutive day working streak. It has paid off though because I have three busing shifts on my schedule for next week.
Since Dante's is only open for dinner, I have had time to look for more career oriented jobs. The search was not good. Given my degree with a double major in Philosophy and Religion, the only business jobs were available to me were jobs in sales. I was called in for interviews for selling stocks, insurance to old people, employees to companies, and mortgages. For most of the jobs, I got out of the hiring process before decisions had been made whether they would hire me or not. The one job I actually would have taken was the job selling mortgages, and I didn't get the job.
Disappointed with the opportunities available to me, I have decided to go back to school. I've applied to start going to Georgia State University as early as this summer with the intention of getting a Masters of International Business. I think it is a good plan for me because one of my main fears of going to law school was being tied to a certain area, and studying international business will create more opportunities to work abroad. I'm also going to take my time and take all the class I didn't take because I was trying to graduate. Maybe I'll fill in a couple holes in my philosophical education, take some art or music classes, or learn astrology and palm reading. I'm really excited about having a second college experience with all the knowledge of how to have fun with it I gained the first time around.
It seems strange to me that I still should be in China right now. That life seems more foreign to me right now than it did before I went. I will certainly conclude my tales of travel in China in the next week or two.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Guilin and Yangshuo
When we arrived in Guilin, we quickly and easily checked into our hostel. Our train arrived at nine and we were out strolling around the city by ten. We were immediately impressed with Guilin. The city is full of water. There are three rivers flowing past karst peaks. All the streets are tree-lined, and everything was still nice and green. It was a little cloudy and blustery, but it was still beautiful.
First we went to Solitary Beauty Peak. It is a karst mountain in the middle of town with a small complex surrounding it. Apparently, Sun Yatsen took residency there at some point. Grace questioned the fifty yuan entrance fee, and ultimately, she turned out to be right to be skeptical of it's worth. We climbed the stairs to the peak for a nice view, and a tour guide let us in the cave under the mountain.
We spent the afternoon strolling around the rivers and lakes. My stomach had been a little upset since the morning, so we decided to take a nap to see if that would help. It did, and we enjoyed some pizza for dinner. Afterwards we watched the fountain, lights, and music show out on the lake. It was something the Chinese could have made horribly cheesy, but they didn't. We sat by the lake for awhile and enjoyed ourselves.
In the night, my upset stomach culminated in me throwing up. It was relieving because I felt better immediately afterwards.
The next morning, Grace and I went to the police station to get her visa extended. We rented bikes to cover more distance during the day. The rental cost only twenty yuan and there was no deposit, but they told us that if we lost them they would cost five hundred yuan a piece. We got the the police station at nine and they told us that the visa office was in a meeting. After over an hour passed, there was no sign of the visa staff and people were piling us for visa services. We decided to go do something and come back after lunch.
We went to nearby Seven Star Park. The seven peaks in the park are supposed to look like the big dipper. It was the best park I've been to in China. Cheesy music was noticeably missing; the scenery was great. Grace and I wondered off the path and ended up climbing up one of the peaks. It wasn't very difficult, but after we took a look at the hill from a distance, we were more impressed with ourselves. The view from on top was nice, but it was still as cloudy and hazy as the day before. We blazed our own path up, but we saw the way others normally came when we reached the top. We took their less grueling path back down.
We still had some time to kill before the police station reopened after lunch. We had lunch and wandered until it was time to get back to the police station. We walked out of the gate to the part and I pointed to the place where our bikes were locked. There were no bikes. We ran over. Our lock was cleanly cut and placed in the basket of a bike that was locked to the same pole ours was.
There was actually deliberation on where to put our bikes when we arrived. Most bikes were parked in this one area but not locked to anything. We chose to put our bikes on a light pole near the street. There were many people walking by and many cars going past. We locked both our bikes together through the wheels and then locked then to the pole. Only my lock that went around both bikes and the pole was cut, so someone took the two bikes and put them in a truck. Luckily, we were already on our way to the police station.
When we got to the police station, we were served promptly. Grace handled her visa paperwork, and I was told that we had to go to a different police station to report our stolen bikes. Grace had to get a photo and copies of her visa made to finish processing it, so we decided to finish that first.
We were referred to a photo shop out of the station on our right, and directions from locals lead us back and forth down the street for what seemed like hours. When we finally arrived at the photo shop, we were told that we would have to wait till four to get our pictures. Our bikes were stolen between 10:00 and 2:30, so I assumed that the police's chances of recovering the bikes were significantly dropping. We debated whether or not to report the bikes, the Lonely Planet said that the police sometimes recover stolen articles. Four o'clock turned into five o'clock four our pictures. However, waiting the extra time led to a new shift at the visa office and new time to return for Grace's new visa. Originally, we had been told it would be ready in a week, next Monday, but the new officer told us it would be ready on Friday.
We then trudged onward to the police station. I managed to get across what was stolen, when, and where, but communication was difficult. I was really pleased with the demeanor of the police; they were very patient with us and pleasant. The told us to go back to our hostel and have them translate for us.
When we returned to the hostel, we had them call the police. After having them translate some things, they wanted me to show them where exactly the bicycles were stolen. I took a cab with one of the hostel workers and showed them where the bikes were, and we went to a different police station. The police officer there said that they would start looking for the bikes the next day after they had the receipts from the bikes. The employee encouraged me by saying that the police had recovered two stolen bikes for their hostel before. Regardless, I had to go to an ATM and fork over one thousand yuan. The bikes weren't Beijing clunkers, but they certainly make a substantial profit on them.
The next morning we got our things together and left for Yangshuo. The bus only took an hour, but in that time Grace's stomach got upset. We checked into our new hostel. Down one thousand yuan, we opted for the ten yuan beds for our stay. The roof is slanted; I can't stand up all the way; there is no heat; and the music was blaring in our rooms from the clubs on the street last night. You get what you pay for, but I still slept fine.
Yangshuo is even more impressive than Guilin. The rock faces are sharper and the village runs right up next to the peaks. The town is catered to backpackers, so I've enjoyed lasagna, blueberry cheesecake, and banana pancakes since I've been here.
After wandering around town for awhile on arrival, Grace leaned over a rail by the river and threw up. Mostly since we've been here we've only walked around town and ate. Last night a fellow traveler advertised five yuan beer from the second floor of a restaurant. We went up and chatted with them for a while, and they saw some people with whom they had taken a tour earlier in the week. They turned out to be two brothers who were photographers for National Geographic who had been working in a story in Hong Kong about shark fin soup. We reveled over them having everyone's dream job. They were actually born and raised in Bermuda, but had take residency in Colorado during their adolescence. Our conversation was cut short by Grace becoming sick again, and we returned to her rail for a more violent vomiting session. We went ahead and went to bed. Grace threw up two more in our bathroom during the night.
Today, Grace's condition has only improved slightly. She's stopped throwing up, but she is still pretty incapacitated. We took a long walk this morning, but we returned not long afterwards so Grace could take a nap. I took one with her to keep her company. We hoped to get two days of bike riding in before we returned to Guilin, but I'm still hopeful that Grace will improve over the day and we'll get a full day of something in tomorrow. We are carrying some good medicine and we upped the strength of her medicine from over the counter to prescription.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Crystal's Village
Here is the second installment of my journal entries. Make sure to check out the corresponding album on my picture site to see what everything looked like.
I just woke up from my first night on the hard sleeper car on the train. It was such a treat; I could barely stop smiling. It was so comfortable; I didn't have to push through people to go to the bathroom or get hot water for my noodles. Getting there required a bit of persuasion though.
We decided to try to catch the train to Guilin from Luohe, but there were only standing tickets for the next three days. There was no bus to get us there either. Grace wanted to go back to Zhenghou to see if we could catch a train or a bus to Guilin from there. I pushed her to buy the standing ticket for the eight teen hour ride and promised her that if we could upgrade to the hard sleeper, we would. I just wanted to keep moving in the right direction even at the expense of comfort. If we had went to Zhengzhou there was no assurance that we could get to Guilin that day and waiting in Zhengzhou for a seat would have been extremely boring.
Grace reluctantly agreed to buy the standing ticket. Crystal helped us buy some stools as insurance and sent us with a note to explain that we wanted to upgrade our tickets.
We sat in the train station waiting for our train, and a couple of minutes before the train was supposed to arrive, a train station attendant came out and told everyone waiting for the train something. Everyone lined up and started walking away from the waiting area; we had no clue what was said, so we just followed the line.
The line went out of the train station and toward another entrance. The attendant that lead the line waited at the entrance and collected ten yuan from everyone walking in. Completely clueless about what was happening, I told the attendant that I wanted to buy a ticket for the hard sleeper. She was confused, understandably given what was actually happening, but she did let us in for free. We were lead into the first-class waiting room, and after chatting with some other attendants, I found out that our train had been delayed thirty minutes. While waiting, we got to watch the end of the Nuggets-Cavs game on the biggest TV I've seen in China.
When our train arrived, we handed our note to someone working on the train; I said we wanted harder sleeper tickets, and we were whisked away to the sleeper car. We upgraded our tickets with no problems.
I'm really glad that everything worked out on the first occasion because if it hadn't, Grace's trust in my asking to take small risks would have lessened for the rest of the trip. As it is , I have this as evidence that everything will turn out fine.
We arrived in Zhengzhou on Thursday morning at 7:30. We took some time to freshen up and eat some breakfast at a nearby McDonald's. With the help of Crystal's directions, we were on a bus bound for the seat of his county, Wuyang, by nine o'clock.
Before we even got off the bus in Wuyang, we spotted Crystal. He took us to the beauty salon that his three older sisters run. We sat our bags down and went to lunch with two of them.
After lunch, we took a minibus to the village where Crystal grew up, Zhanggudong, His parents still live there, and we went to their house right away. All the houses in the village had high concrete or brick walls around them. There was a little, open concrete area before the house where Crystal's family kept chickens, a goat, and some vegetables. They also had a well, clotheslines running criss-cross from the walls with two dead chickens hanging there, and a tiny brown dog named Bao Bao. The entire house and roof was made from concrete. There were stairs leading to the flat roof running along the side of their house. In addition to his parents being there, his grandmother came from a couple houses down to greet us.
We spent the afternoon strolling through the village. The trees were bare and gray, but the fields encircling the village were green with sprouting wheat. People popped out of their houses to look at us as we walked by. Crystal met everyone by asking if they had eaten yet. I asked him why he greeted everyone this way, and he told me it is a polite greeting. Dried corn stalks were plied everywhere; they burned them instead of wood to keep warm since the trees in the area are sparse.
We wandered past a small stream and then a larger river that had slowly cut through the plain. As the sun set, the view embodied the romanticized image of village life. Green fields, trees, and the setting sun were reflected off the tranquil stream. Crystal pointed to a mountain in the distance and said that the cave inside the mountain was a beautiful palace. There he became blood-brothers with one of the monks.
Crystal told us stories about what he called the best time in his life, his childhood. He showed us the places where he swam in the summers and killed frogs with blow guns to enjoy as a snack.
He also showed us how the village had changed since he left. He said that along the river there were large trees that he played in with his friends, but now the river was devoid of trees. They were cut down so someone could dredge sand from the river and sell it.
We learned a little more about Crystal's life along that walk. He went to elementary school in a nearby village until age twelve. For middle and high school, he went to public boarding schools in Wuyang, so at twelve, he was out of the house and essentially living on his own. He said he was happy to leave his home for school. One time, he told me a story about being robbed at knife point while he stayed at school over the weekend in high school; the story never quite made sense to me until he told me that he went to boarding school. Apparently, this boarding school system is pretty common for villages in China.
We returned to his parents home for dinner. It was pretty rough for Grace and I. There was a mushroom and pepper dish, carrots that tasted like baijiu, mushroom soup, and big, fluffy rolls. Neither Grace nor I are fond of mushrooms at all, and the preparation of these rendered them very chewy. I enjoyed the broth of the soup and ate whatever they insisted I eat, but I didn't make it half way through my soup. Grace could only stomach the bread. We felt bad because most people in the village were standing outside with bowls of rice porridge, so it was obvious that this was a special meal. I told Grace to eat a couple times through my teeth, but neither of us could do justice to the meal.
The weather had been very pleasant, especially compared to Harbin, but when the sun went down, it became frigid. I wasn't prepared with my Harbin clothing, so I was frozen. I was far colder there, thousands of miles south of Harbin. Grace had more clothes than I, so she wasn't bad off. Before we could go to bed, we had to wash our feet; I wasn't too happy about taking my shoes and socks off. I didn't pay attention to the sleeping arrangements for Crystal and his parents that night, but Grace and I were put in a bed that was simply wooden crates pushed together with a comforter on top. I left on all of my clothes and crawled under the blankets, and when Grace got under the covers, I tried my best to steal all her heat.
The next morning, we woke up late by the village's standards. Breakfast was ready within minutes. We had Chinese breakfast burritos. There were standard flour tortillas with egg, green pepper, and dried, roasted duck. The left over mushrooms and carrots were brought back out, but they didn't make it into our first burritos. When they fixed my second burrito for me, it included the undesirable dishes, but I enjoyed breakfast anyway.
We went over to Crystal's grandmother's house after breakfast. Her house had brick walls, and the interior was wall papered with newspapers; The roof was made from woven sticks. In her courtyard area, crops were growing. She was glad to see us and pulled out her one frame of pictures to show us. It was a collage of dirt and water damaged pictures of her family. Sifting through the pictures, we got the story of part of their family tree.
Crystal's great-grandfather was a member of Shang Kaishek's army. There were five officers from their village in the army including Crystal's great-grandfather. After the Communists took over, the other four officers and their families fled to Taiwan; Crystal's great grandfather decided to stay in mainland China. He thought what he did was right and that the new government would respect his decision to stay. Communist troops came to the village and executed him. Supposedly, the other four families are very in Taiwan now. Crystal's great-grandmother died giving birth to his grandfather, but his great-grandfather remarried. His grandfather's stepmother also died young. His grandparents had three children: Crystal's father and his two aunts. His grandfather died when Crystal was four. He only remembers crying at his funeral.
I asked Crystal if older people in the village didn't like Chairman Mao because people in the village fought for the Nationalists. He said that some of them didn't. I asked what Crystal thought of Chairman Mao. He told me that Mao was the right person to lead the war but wasn't the right person to run the country, and the country would have been better off without the Cultural Revolution. I said that I couldn't understand Chinese people's admiration for Mao considering what happened during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. I commented that the type of government Mao fought against is how the Chinese government is run today. Crystal said that many injustices happen because there is no separation of the government, courts, and police. I asked why he chose to join the Communist Party since he had these criticisms of the government. He said joining the Party would be good for his future.
It was still very cold that morning, and sitting in the cold, shaded house didn't help things. Crystal offered to show us his elementary school, and we were eager to get moving and get our blood flowing. His grandmother asked for us to stay and offered to start a fire, but we declined.
On the way over to the next village to see Crystal's elementary school, some people had started a fire with corn stalks in the middle of the road. During the winter, there is no work to be done in the fields, so people just hang out and chat. Goats were grazing and standing on top of the dirt mound tombs in the fields. I ran around trying to pet the goats for a little while, but found out that they weren't like the one's in the petting zoo. They evaded me, and we continued on to the next village.
Along the way, Crystal said that mice would tear up the roots and eat the crops, so they want to get rid of them. When he and his friends were younger, they would catch mice and put beans in their butt to kill them. This would make them go crazy and kill all the other mice. Then the bean would grow and kill the mouse. Furthermore, he claimed that the mice holes in the field were very nice homes and complete with a bedroom, living room, and kitchen.
The next village over look almost exactly the same as Crystal's. We just strolled right into school and had a look around. Class was still in session, and we peaked in to the detriment of classroom productivity. The school was built like a small motel. The two stories of classrooms opened to outdoor hallways. Crystal said that when he was in school, kids from different villages would fight each other. During school they would climb the trees in the courtyard of the school and read books. The teacher would slice watermelon and throw it to them in the tree.
A student popped out of one of the upstairs classrooms to ring the bell, and all the classes filed into the courtyard. Grace and I were surrounded by little eyes that had almost certainly never seen a white person before. I tried to chat with some of them, but they were too shy for that. A circle formed around me, and brave students dashed across through the circle as close as they could to me without being in danger of being eaten by the giant, white monster. I played along and lunged into the circle; smiling and screaming students scattered in a way that was not unlike chasing the goats. I captured one of the littlest ones and threw him over my shoulder. After a good spinning, he was released. The bell rang again, and the students filed back into their classes.
We returned to Crystal's home for lunch. The two dead chickens that were hanging on the clothesline when we arrived had made their way into a stew with chopped carrots and what Crystal called white carrots. No part of the chicken was spared, so the stew was complete with bones, organs, two heads, and four feet. It was a test to guess what part of the chicken you were eating. It was a good stew and was my favorite meal that we had in the village.
We packed up our bags and started making our way back to town. Walking along to the bus stop, people peeked out of their houses to get one last look at us. Crystal decided that it would be better for us to take a motor tricycles into town rather than wait for the bus.
When we returned to town, we had discovered it was a market day. The city was swollen with people and stands selling everything from food and clothing to appliances and mopeds. We put our bags back into the beauty salon, and set out into town in search of train or bus tickets to Guilin for the next day.
One the way to the office that sold train tickets, we observed a curious event. A man was sitting on the back of a pickup truck and speaking on a microphone over the two large speakers that were behind him. In front of him, there were a few unopened boxes stacked on top of each other. People were crowded all around the truck holding up bills in their hands in denominations all the way to one hundred. After working the crowd, he opened the boxes and revealed the mystery product, shampoo. He began exchanging the shampoo for one hundred yuan bills that were raised in the air. More people came up and gave him money. This shampoo didn't look very special. It was average in size and plainly packaged in a dull orange bottle. There wasn't even English on the bottles. I asked Crystal what he was saying to get the people to buy the shampoo, but he couldn't explain.
A trip to the train office revealed that there were no seat on the train from Luohe to Guilin the next day. The following trip to the bus station informed us that there was no direct route from Wuyang to Guilin. When we got back to the beauty salon, a customer there told us that there was a bus from Luohe to Guilin and called someone to confirm it.
Grace was offered a free facial from one of Crystal's sisters. I later found out that this treatment consisted of putting different lotions on her face and getting her head and shoulders rubbed and beaten. In the meantime, Crystal said that since there were not enough places for us to sleep, the had gotten us a hotel room. I objected to them paying for it, but they refused to take my money. Crystal and I moved our bags over to the hotel, and Grace's facial was finished when we returned. We went out to dinner and went to bed.
In the morning, we took baths at a bath house near our hotel. Afterwards, we hopped on a bus to Luohe to seek onward transportation.
I just woke up from my first night on the hard sleeper car on the train. It was such a treat; I could barely stop smiling. It was so comfortable; I didn't have to push through people to go to the bathroom or get hot water for my noodles. Getting there required a bit of persuasion though.
We decided to try to catch the train to Guilin from Luohe, but there were only standing tickets for the next three days. There was no bus to get us there either. Grace wanted to go back to Zhenghou to see if we could catch a train or a bus to Guilin from there. I pushed her to buy the standing ticket for the eight teen hour ride and promised her that if we could upgrade to the hard sleeper, we would. I just wanted to keep moving in the right direction even at the expense of comfort. If we had went to Zhengzhou there was no assurance that we could get to Guilin that day and waiting in Zhengzhou for a seat would have been extremely boring.
Grace reluctantly agreed to buy the standing ticket. Crystal helped us buy some stools as insurance and sent us with a note to explain that we wanted to upgrade our tickets.
We sat in the train station waiting for our train, and a couple of minutes before the train was supposed to arrive, a train station attendant came out and told everyone waiting for the train something. Everyone lined up and started walking away from the waiting area; we had no clue what was said, so we just followed the line.
The line went out of the train station and toward another entrance. The attendant that lead the line waited at the entrance and collected ten yuan from everyone walking in. Completely clueless about what was happening, I told the attendant that I wanted to buy a ticket for the hard sleeper. She was confused, understandably given what was actually happening, but she did let us in for free. We were lead into the first-class waiting room, and after chatting with some other attendants, I found out that our train had been delayed thirty minutes. While waiting, we got to watch the end of the Nuggets-Cavs game on the biggest TV I've seen in China.
When our train arrived, we handed our note to someone working on the train; I said we wanted harder sleeper tickets, and we were whisked away to the sleeper car. We upgraded our tickets with no problems.
I'm really glad that everything worked out on the first occasion because if it hadn't, Grace's trust in my asking to take small risks would have lessened for the rest of the trip. As it is , I have this as evidence that everything will turn out fine.
We arrived in Zhengzhou on Thursday morning at 7:30. We took some time to freshen up and eat some breakfast at a nearby McDonald's. With the help of Crystal's directions, we were on a bus bound for the seat of his county, Wuyang, by nine o'clock.
Before we even got off the bus in Wuyang, we spotted Crystal. He took us to the beauty salon that his three older sisters run. We sat our bags down and went to lunch with two of them.
After lunch, we took a minibus to the village where Crystal grew up, Zhanggudong, His parents still live there, and we went to their house right away. All the houses in the village had high concrete or brick walls around them. There was a little, open concrete area before the house where Crystal's family kept chickens, a goat, and some vegetables. They also had a well, clotheslines running criss-cross from the walls with two dead chickens hanging there, and a tiny brown dog named Bao Bao. The entire house and roof was made from concrete. There were stairs leading to the flat roof running along the side of their house. In addition to his parents being there, his grandmother came from a couple houses down to greet us.
We spent the afternoon strolling through the village. The trees were bare and gray, but the fields encircling the village were green with sprouting wheat. People popped out of their houses to look at us as we walked by. Crystal met everyone by asking if they had eaten yet. I asked him why he greeted everyone this way, and he told me it is a polite greeting. Dried corn stalks were plied everywhere; they burned them instead of wood to keep warm since the trees in the area are sparse.
We wandered past a small stream and then a larger river that had slowly cut through the plain. As the sun set, the view embodied the romanticized image of village life. Green fields, trees, and the setting sun were reflected off the tranquil stream. Crystal pointed to a mountain in the distance and said that the cave inside the mountain was a beautiful palace. There he became blood-brothers with one of the monks.
Crystal told us stories about what he called the best time in his life, his childhood. He showed us the places where he swam in the summers and killed frogs with blow guns to enjoy as a snack.
He also showed us how the village had changed since he left. He said that along the river there were large trees that he played in with his friends, but now the river was devoid of trees. They were cut down so someone could dredge sand from the river and sell it.
We learned a little more about Crystal's life along that walk. He went to elementary school in a nearby village until age twelve. For middle and high school, he went to public boarding schools in Wuyang, so at twelve, he was out of the house and essentially living on his own. He said he was happy to leave his home for school. One time, he told me a story about being robbed at knife point while he stayed at school over the weekend in high school; the story never quite made sense to me until he told me that he went to boarding school. Apparently, this boarding school system is pretty common for villages in China.
We returned to his parents home for dinner. It was pretty rough for Grace and I. There was a mushroom and pepper dish, carrots that tasted like baijiu, mushroom soup, and big, fluffy rolls. Neither Grace nor I are fond of mushrooms at all, and the preparation of these rendered them very chewy. I enjoyed the broth of the soup and ate whatever they insisted I eat, but I didn't make it half way through my soup. Grace could only stomach the bread. We felt bad because most people in the village were standing outside with bowls of rice porridge, so it was obvious that this was a special meal. I told Grace to eat a couple times through my teeth, but neither of us could do justice to the meal.
The weather had been very pleasant, especially compared to Harbin, but when the sun went down, it became frigid. I wasn't prepared with my Harbin clothing, so I was frozen. I was far colder there, thousands of miles south of Harbin. Grace had more clothes than I, so she wasn't bad off. Before we could go to bed, we had to wash our feet; I wasn't too happy about taking my shoes and socks off. I didn't pay attention to the sleeping arrangements for Crystal and his parents that night, but Grace and I were put in a bed that was simply wooden crates pushed together with a comforter on top. I left on all of my clothes and crawled under the blankets, and when Grace got under the covers, I tried my best to steal all her heat.
The next morning, we woke up late by the village's standards. Breakfast was ready within minutes. We had Chinese breakfast burritos. There were standard flour tortillas with egg, green pepper, and dried, roasted duck. The left over mushrooms and carrots were brought back out, but they didn't make it into our first burritos. When they fixed my second burrito for me, it included the undesirable dishes, but I enjoyed breakfast anyway.
We went over to Crystal's grandmother's house after breakfast. Her house had brick walls, and the interior was wall papered with newspapers; The roof was made from woven sticks. In her courtyard area, crops were growing. She was glad to see us and pulled out her one frame of pictures to show us. It was a collage of dirt and water damaged pictures of her family. Sifting through the pictures, we got the story of part of their family tree.
Crystal's great-grandfather was a member of Shang Kaishek's army. There were five officers from their village in the army including Crystal's great-grandfather. After the Communists took over, the other four officers and their families fled to Taiwan; Crystal's great grandfather decided to stay in mainland China. He thought what he did was right and that the new government would respect his decision to stay. Communist troops came to the village and executed him. Supposedly, the other four families are very in Taiwan now. Crystal's great-grandmother died giving birth to his grandfather, but his great-grandfather remarried. His grandfather's stepmother also died young. His grandparents had three children: Crystal's father and his two aunts. His grandfather died when Crystal was four. He only remembers crying at his funeral.
I asked Crystal if older people in the village didn't like Chairman Mao because people in the village fought for the Nationalists. He said that some of them didn't. I asked what Crystal thought of Chairman Mao. He told me that Mao was the right person to lead the war but wasn't the right person to run the country, and the country would have been better off without the Cultural Revolution. I said that I couldn't understand Chinese people's admiration for Mao considering what happened during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. I commented that the type of government Mao fought against is how the Chinese government is run today. Crystal said that many injustices happen because there is no separation of the government, courts, and police. I asked why he chose to join the Communist Party since he had these criticisms of the government. He said joining the Party would be good for his future.
It was still very cold that morning, and sitting in the cold, shaded house didn't help things. Crystal offered to show us his elementary school, and we were eager to get moving and get our blood flowing. His grandmother asked for us to stay and offered to start a fire, but we declined.
On the way over to the next village to see Crystal's elementary school, some people had started a fire with corn stalks in the middle of the road. During the winter, there is no work to be done in the fields, so people just hang out and chat. Goats were grazing and standing on top of the dirt mound tombs in the fields. I ran around trying to pet the goats for a little while, but found out that they weren't like the one's in the petting zoo. They evaded me, and we continued on to the next village.
Along the way, Crystal said that mice would tear up the roots and eat the crops, so they want to get rid of them. When he and his friends were younger, they would catch mice and put beans in their butt to kill them. This would make them go crazy and kill all the other mice. Then the bean would grow and kill the mouse. Furthermore, he claimed that the mice holes in the field were very nice homes and complete with a bedroom, living room, and kitchen.
The next village over look almost exactly the same as Crystal's. We just strolled right into school and had a look around. Class was still in session, and we peaked in to the detriment of classroom productivity. The school was built like a small motel. The two stories of classrooms opened to outdoor hallways. Crystal said that when he was in school, kids from different villages would fight each other. During school they would climb the trees in the courtyard of the school and read books. The teacher would slice watermelon and throw it to them in the tree.
A student popped out of one of the upstairs classrooms to ring the bell, and all the classes filed into the courtyard. Grace and I were surrounded by little eyes that had almost certainly never seen a white person before. I tried to chat with some of them, but they were too shy for that. A circle formed around me, and brave students dashed across through the circle as close as they could to me without being in danger of being eaten by the giant, white monster. I played along and lunged into the circle; smiling and screaming students scattered in a way that was not unlike chasing the goats. I captured one of the littlest ones and threw him over my shoulder. After a good spinning, he was released. The bell rang again, and the students filed back into their classes.
We returned to Crystal's home for lunch. The two dead chickens that were hanging on the clothesline when we arrived had made their way into a stew with chopped carrots and what Crystal called white carrots. No part of the chicken was spared, so the stew was complete with bones, organs, two heads, and four feet. It was a test to guess what part of the chicken you were eating. It was a good stew and was my favorite meal that we had in the village.
We packed up our bags and started making our way back to town. Walking along to the bus stop, people peeked out of their houses to get one last look at us. Crystal decided that it would be better for us to take a motor tricycles into town rather than wait for the bus.
When we returned to town, we had discovered it was a market day. The city was swollen with people and stands selling everything from food and clothing to appliances and mopeds. We put our bags back into the beauty salon, and set out into town in search of train or bus tickets to Guilin for the next day.
One the way to the office that sold train tickets, we observed a curious event. A man was sitting on the back of a pickup truck and speaking on a microphone over the two large speakers that were behind him. In front of him, there were a few unopened boxes stacked on top of each other. People were crowded all around the truck holding up bills in their hands in denominations all the way to one hundred. After working the crowd, he opened the boxes and revealed the mystery product, shampoo. He began exchanging the shampoo for one hundred yuan bills that were raised in the air. More people came up and gave him money. This shampoo didn't look very special. It was average in size and plainly packaged in a dull orange bottle. There wasn't even English on the bottles. I asked Crystal what he was saying to get the people to buy the shampoo, but he couldn't explain.
A trip to the train office revealed that there were no seat on the train from Luohe to Guilin the next day. The following trip to the bus station informed us that there was no direct route from Wuyang to Guilin. When we got back to the beauty salon, a customer there told us that there was a bus from Luohe to Guilin and called someone to confirm it.
Grace was offered a free facial from one of Crystal's sisters. I later found out that this treatment consisted of putting different lotions on her face and getting her head and shoulders rubbed and beaten. In the meantime, Crystal said that since there were not enough places for us to sleep, the had gotten us a hotel room. I objected to them paying for it, but they refused to take my money. Crystal and I moved our bags over to the hotel, and Grace's facial was finished when we returned. We went out to dinner and went to bed.
In the morning, we took baths at a bath house near our hotel. Afterwards, we hopped on a bus to Luohe to seek onward transportation.
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